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CCE-RIGliT DEPOSIT. 



THE 

USES OF ADVERSITY 

AND 
OTHER ESSAYS 



CHARLES W. COLLINS 





BOSTON 

THE PILOT PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1916 



*& 






Nihil Obstat 
PATRICK J. WATERS, Ph. D. 

Imprimatur 
* WILLIAM CARDINAL O'CONNELL 

Archbishop of Boston 



NOV -6/91S 

Copyright 1916 by Charles W. Collins 
©CIA446523 



V 

U* 



To the 

Pilot Publishing Company and its officers 

By whom these little papers were 

First given a welcome in the columns of 

The Pilot 

Gratitude and thanks 

For past encouragement and for their present 

Permanent form 

Are hereby acknowledged 

By the Author. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

FOREWORD 6 

THE USES OF ADVERSITY 8 

THE BLESSING OF NECESSITY 14 

THE FUTILITY OF BITTERNESS 20 

GREAT AND LITTLE MEN 26 

THE MIRAGE 32 

SARCASM 38 

THE OPEN MIND 44 

COMPROMISE 49 

RELIABLE MEN 54 

THE CALL OF THE SEA 59 

UNCONSCIOUS POETS 65 

HEROES AND VALETS 71 

SELF EXPRESSION 76 

MECHANICAL MILLENIUM 83 

MURDER AND MONEY 89 

THE MODERN CITY 94 

IGNORANCE AND EDUCATION 100 

ACROBATS '. 105 

OBLIGATIONS Ill 

THE BETTERERS 116 

TAKING PAINS 121 

UNWORKED MINES 127 

ATROCIOUS ENGLISH 132 

BLATHER 138 

APPEARANCES 143 

THE AUTUMNAL DIRGE 149 



CONTENTS— Continued. 



Page 

THE SEEKERS 155 

POPULAR TASTE 160 

DEMAGOGUES 165 

THE GLAD HAND 170 

CHILDHOOD 176 

THE BECKONING WEST 182 

THE MORNING INTERVAL 187 

ACCOMPLISHMENT 192 

TODAY 198 

THE BLACK M'AN 204 

FRIENDSHIP 210 

ENCOURAGEMENT 216 

THE LAND OF JOY 222 

THE AGELESS HEART 227 

IN MEMORIAM 233 




FOREWORD. 



G"lHESTERTON, writing of the "Toy 
Theatre" remarks that "the most inter- 
esting thing about the theatrical art is 
that the spectator sees the whole thing 
through a window." 

The most interesting thing about life is 
that the spectator sees it through two small win- 
dows which, though limiting his range, provide 
in turn a wealth of detail and a vista of bound- 
less variety and charm. The moving procession, 
the still background have, of course, an objective 
reality; but each individual brings to the survey 
a store of memories and a mental viewpoint all 
his own. 

This mental refraction and coloring of per- 
sonality have two important consequences for 
human knowledge and literature: they thwart 
the formation of a complete and accurate mass 
of data on such topics as science and history, 
but, on the other hand, they endow mankind with 
the inexhaustible riches of imagination and in- 
dependent thought. Science is as unreliable as 
the sea. History, even when treating of con- 
temporaneous events, is one-sided and fragmen- 
tary and becomes the more vague and misleading 



FOREWORD. 



according to the remoteness of the period 
studied. 

Contrast with this the imagery and music of 
the poet, the multitude of characters springing 
from the brain of the novelist, the flashing 
power and far horizon of the philosopher; all 
because each, whatever his gifts or bent, looks 
out upon the world and humanity through two 
small windows and beholds what is given no 
other in the whole universe to see just as he 
sees it. 

The reminiscences of the policeman, the ideas 
of the car-conductor, the philosophy of "the man 
on the street" have a real value as well as those 
of the men and women to whom the world listens 
with bated breath for each has a story to tell 
that is unique. The pity is, that while the vision 
and the thought are universal, the faculty of 
adequate and sincere expression is given to few. 

The above then is the Apologia for this book 
or, if you will, this series of glimpses at life. 
It brings no new message. It preaches no gos- 
pel. It solves no problems. But it has this 
title to existence, a title like the "key of the 
fields" for those who seek it. It is a human 
document, things seen by the Looker-On 
through his two small windows. 



THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 



a-IDVERSITY is like the Angel with 
whom Jacob wrestled. It blesses 
those who strive against it. Men 
ever sigh for wealth and ease, twin 
foes of individuals and States. No one 
yearns for adversity though its stroke 
is beneficent. Few strong, true men are 
overborne by trials ; they rise above them 
purified and strengthened, but myriads of 
giant souls have succumbed to the Circean 
spell of prosperity and under it have for- 
gotten manhood and honor. Men like 
moths love to hover around the flame that 
will wither them. 

The great empires, the mighty nations 
that endured long and won great glory, 
were nurtured in the hard cradle of self- 
denial, extended their confines by disci- 
pline and economy and went to ruin 
through excessive wealth and the enerva- 
tion that follows in its train. Had the Na- 
poleon of Waterloo been the Napoleon of 



THE USES OF ADVERSITY 



Marengo and Lodi the history of Europe 
would be different today. 

No soft-handed people unaccustomed to 
braving the elements and the savage could 
have torn America from England's grasp 
and built up this Republic. The colonist in 
the Western wilderness prepared himself 
in adversity for the conflict that brought 
this nation into being. Nor could England 
herself have come to her present position 
or retained the colonies that are now hers 
had not her sons preserved a good modi- 
cum of that discipline and fortitude in 
hardship, by which her empire has been 
built up and maintained. 

Persecuted peoples are the hardiest. 
They may lose their national identity but 
they will win in every clime. The Jews 
have ceaselessly borne for thousands of 
years every variety of misfortune, the 
Land of Promise has passed from them, 
they are exiles ; yet in every civilized land 
they constitute a minority strong out of 
all proportion with their numbers. 

The Irish people ground for centuries 
under the heel of an atrocious tyranny 
have not been annihilated by it but 



THB USES OP ADVHRSTFT 



strengthened. They have made their mark 
in every nation under the sun. They are 
in the van of progress throughout the 
world. Wherever you find a man of might 
and kindness, a man of eloquence and prac- 
ticalness, a man who will ride into the jaws 
of death unterrified or sway thousands 
with the magic of his voice, you may be 
sure that he is at least in part an Irish- 
man. 

England persecuted Ireland, yet in that 
persecution she has been the means of 
breeding a type of man which the world 
had never known before. 

The men whose names are writ large 
across the pages of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury and those who stand today the ac- 
credited leaders in every sphere of activity 
were not cradled in the lap of luxury, but 
imbibed the energy that made them what 
they are, from the hard breast of that se- 
vere nurse, Adversity. 

Read their biographies and you will find 
that they were brought up in small houses, 
with scanty food, that they wrested edu- 
cation from life, that they fought every 
step of their way up the heights ; and if 



THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 11 

their faces are a bit grim and their hearts 
somewhat seared, we should not wonder, 
for these scarred warriors have come 
through a hundred battles. 

Watch workmen flinging coal or rock 
against a screen. The larger lumps re- 
sist the impact and remain outside, the 
smaller ones pass through the coarse wires, 
next against a screen of closer meshes and 
so on until the different sizes are distrib- 
uted. So are men flung against the screen 
of life. Those of strong character and 
intelligence resist the impact and take the 
first places. Lesser men are sifted through 
the graduated series of meshes of the life- 
screen until they reach their allotted place 
and field of usefulness or uselessness. It 
is the shock, the impact, that proves their 
quality. 

Perfection comes through pain or some- 
thing analogous to pain. Marble is hewn 
into the statue by the blows of the chisel 
and the mallet, the diamond is cut and 
polished into glittering facets by keen in- 
struments and the remorseless wheel, the 
dream of the architect comes into being 
only when stones torn from the hillside 



12 THE USES OF ADVBRSITT. 

are cut into symmetry by ceaseless blows, 
when trees shorn of their dignity and fo- 
liage are sawed and planed into proper di- 
mensions. 

The laughing child, the smooth-browed 
youth and maiden, have that beauty of 
Nature about them that we see in the 
blooming meadow and the quiet forest ; but 
it is only when time, experience and adver- 
sity have written their record on the brow 
and the brain behind it that men and 
women reach their true maturity of char- 
acter. 

Uniformly through created things from 
the lowest to the highest works the inex- 
orable law that the worth of man as the 
worth of things must be shown forth 
through bitterness and pain. Life does to 
the soul of man what civilization and its 
works do to inanimate Nature — tears, 
cuts and smooths it to beauty and useful- 
ness by hard blows. 

Adversity alone strengthens. The an- 
cient pagan saw that life was hard, steeled 
his soul and worked on. The modern 
pagan does the same. But man is more 



THE USES OP ADVERSITT. 13 

than a beast and there is not equity in 
this view of life. 

Christ has blessed adversity ; glorified it 
with a halo that is His own. He first went 
up that awful road that leads to the Cross 
and proved to men that the path of adver- 
sity is the way to Heaven ; that it is only 
through pain, sorrow and death that we 
come to the only victory and only peace 
that are worth striving for by the sons of 
men. 



THE BLESSING OF 
NECESSITY. 



ffi 



OST of the best work that men have 
done in this world was done be- 
cause they had to do it. It matters 
little whether the necessity was 
material or psychological; whether it was 
that they must succeed or starve, or were 
impelled to action by a mysterious law of 
their souls. However we reason it out, 
for them there w r as no middle course, no 
alternative ; they were compelled to labor, 
ponder, improve until their work was com- 
plete and flawless. 

Of course, there is this great difference 
between the work that is done by men to 
gain bread or pay a debt, and tha.t which 
is the result of an inward conviction that 
they are the bearers of a message which 
they must deliver in the most perfect and 
enduring form; one is accidental, the 
other a part of the man. But the result 
in each case is the same. Necessity is the 
motive power. 



THE BLESSING OP NECESSITY. 15 

How often we see men with every gift 
except energy ! All their ability is palsied 
by incorrigible indolence. They put off 
the time of exertion from day to day and 
daily the potentiality evaporates. Finally, 
there comes the time when their eyes are 
opened, but their hands are powerless, and 
then comes bitter pessimism. 

What a curse is laziness! It robs the 
most gifted man of the power of produc- 
tion. It makes of him who might have 
been an ornament of his age, a benefactor 
of his kind, an honor to his family, nothing 
but a useless hulk. Fortunate is the man 
congenitally lazy whom hard necessity or 
the irresistable impulse from within, 
pushes on to accomplishment. Necessity 
has redeemed him. 

Look at the crowds content to gain a 
livelihood, earn enough for food, buy pleas- 
ure and nothing more. Look at the hosts 
of men with intelligence and education who 
accomplish nothing and sink to the level 
of the illiterate toiler. There can be no 
question that in the multitude is extra- 
ordinary ability, which under happier con- 
ditions with more inward force, might 



U THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

have won all the rewards that life holds 
out to him who strives. 

Consider the inventions that have revo- 
lutionized life in modern times. Not one 
of these marvellous machines has been 
evolved except at the expense of sleepless 
nights, laborious days, monastic self-de- 
nial and a perseverance all but incredible. 
These inventors were possessed by their 
message. They could not but keep on until 
it had been delivered to mankind in the 
best form they could give to it. Necessity 
compelled them. 

Consider the architects of the modern 
fabulous fortunes. Prescinding from the 
morality of their methods, the amount of 
work the producers of these fortunes have 
performed staggers belief. As an example 
of what human ability and iron will can do, 
it stands apart in the annals of mankind. 
Almost every one of these men started at 
the bottom and forced his way into power 
by herculean struggles. What power urged 
them on? 

The men who have done great things in 
our land in statesmanship, in the profes- 
sions, who stand today the leaders of the 



THE BLESSING OF NECESSITY. 37 

nation, have worked harder and more con- 
stantly than the laborer in the trench. 
Progress in these lines is never easy. There 
is but one way to the top, that of hard, 
gruelling work. Would these men have 
condemned themselves to careers of cease- 
less toil, not only to gain a place, but hav- 
ing gained, to hold it, unless they felt they 
had to? I trow not. 

Go over the long list of scientists who 
have wrung from Nature her deeply hidden 
secrets, who have found out the enemies 
of the human system in the blood and tis- 
sues, who have lengthened the span of life 
for millions and given to humanity a 
working and winning force that otherwise 
would have been a dream. They have done 
all these things on the spur of necessity. 
Whether they worked for mankind, for 
fame, or for wealth, need not concern us : 
they have proved themselves overpower- 
ing benefactors to men. These blessings 
we would not have, had not necessity com- 
pelled the discoverers to go on until the 
result was achieved. 

Consider the great books that men have 
written for the instruction and enjoyment 



THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 



of their contemporaries and posterity. 
Hardly one of these but was rewritten 
scores of times, pondered and polished un- 
til they were masterpieces. It is an in- 
tolerable labor, yet scholars and artists 
will do it until the end of the world, be- 
cause they must do it. 

Finally, the highest and most important 
work that men have before them in life is 
the salvation of their souls. If they 
"scorn delights and live laborious days/' 
fast, pray, scourge their bodies by morti- 
fication, tell themselves that life is short 
and eternity long, that pleasure deludes 
and the world is a snare, and use up the 
power of their souls that they may de- 
velop in those souls spirituality, that 
cleanness of heart v/ithout which we can- 
not see God, we can be sure they suffer and 
do all these things, because they are con- 
vinced to the innermost fibre Of their be- 
ings, that they must do so or die the 
eternal death. 

Yes, necessity is indeed a blessing to 
mankind. Let those, therefore, whose 
lives are hard and duties endless and re- 
sponsibilities without number, cease repin- 



THE BLESSING OF NECESSITY. i9 

ing and be thankful that such is their lot, 
for they are the most fortunate of man- 
kind. Without work there is nothing, and 
there is no lasting work, no enduring ac- 
complishment that is not born of that 
hard-featured, yet kind-hearted and wise 
mother, Necessity. 



THE FUTILITY OF 
BITTERNESS. 



9 



N AUTHOR, whose books have de- 
lighted thousands, met with a 
great sorrow, one sufficient to shad- 
ow forever the life of an ordinary 
man. I often wondered how it would affect 
his work. Some weeks ago a short story 
from his pen was published, a little tale 
so sprightly, so deftly told and shot 
through with sunshine, that I marvelled 
he could produce it even under the happi- 
est circumstances. 

I sent my congratulations, adding that 
I was glad to see that trouble had not em- 
bittered him. At the end of his character* 
istic letter, he set down these words: 
"I do not understand embitterment as the 
result of anything." That phrase has 
given me food for thought ever since. 

How pitifully often do we see men and 
women of more than average ability, 
people who are valuable to the community, 
giving away beneath a stroke of misfor- 
tune and allowing it to render them cyni- 



THE FUTILITY OF BITTERNESS. 21 

cal and discouraged. Metaphorically they 
throw up their hands as if fate had ruined 
their lives and relieved them from fur- 
ther effort. What a detestable obsession ; 
what moral cowardice! The children of 
men have been suffering these blows since 
the expulsion from Eden. Most of what 
we enjoy in the intellectual sphere as well 
as in material comfort, we owe to the 
period after the calamity in each life, the 
fruits of dauntless struggle, the victory 
gained amid the throes of mental or physi- 
cal pain. 

Milton wrote his great poem after he 
was stricken with blindness. Carlyle 
forged his massive productions in the 
agony of dyspepsia. Stevenson labored 
over those classics he has given us, with 
the grisly specter of consumption ever be- 
fore him. It is not necessary to accumu- 
late instances — each reader can easily 
compile his own list. But the lesson in 
all such cases is the same. The test was 
there, coming in one form or another, and 
they worthily passed it and went on to do 
their appointed work with the best energy 
that was in them. 



22 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 

During long railroad journeys I have 
often noticed the barren marshes near 
the sea. Years do not change them. There 
they are with their useless crop of swamp 
grass, a misery even to the eye of the 
traveler. There are dispositions like those 
salt marshes. The individuals have in 
many cases had hard lots, much labor, fre- 
quent disappointments — and these have 
soured them. They view each acquain- 
tance acridly, they have nothing good to 
say of anyone, they seem to take a fear- 
ful joy in the misfortunes of others, as if 
in some diabolical fashion these fed the 
fires of resentment. 

You meet such a person; his cynicism 
makes its impression; you go your way. 
You return after five or ten years. Every 
day in those years has been marked in 
your memory by death, bereavement, 
financial trouble, pitiful cases of disease, 
and you feel a great compassion for the 
suffering, and admiration for courage 
under dire distress. Those years 
likewise have been marked by countless 
triumphs in the spiritual, intellectual and 
material world. Men have accomplished 



THE FUTILITY OF BITTERNESS. 23 

much for the glory and improvement of 
mankind. Heroism has shone forth, great 
works of the mind produced, wonderful 
structures raised, chasms spanned, science 
has gone forward with mighty strides. 
With these thoughts in your mind, you 
encounter the old acquaintance. Not a 
change ! The same sour grimace, the same 
mordant comment, the same unholy glee 
that another soul is suffering. Human 
salt marsh! 

You are on a journey and the train nears 
a point that has always been distasteful 
to you. It was sterile, neglected, offensive 
to sight and smell. You stare in amaze- 
ment. Has Aladdin's genie been at work? 
Instead of noisesome pools, rubbish-strewn 
land and snarling profanity, there are trim 
lawns and flowers, well-kept houses and 
children laughing and desporting on the 
grass. It took hard work to effect 
that transformation, but how beautifully 
worth while it was. Thus too, grace and 
courage transform unpleasant dispositions, 
when their possessors eschew selfishness 
and make up their minds to be of use to 
their neighbors. 



24 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

The fact is, embitterment is synony- 
mous with selfishness; concentrated, un- 
reasonable selfishness. It is individual 
nihilism. They who give it domain over 
them in effect say: "if I cannot have 
health, ease of mind and the good things 
of life, I shall do my best to keep them 
from others and when I cannot do that, I 
shall exert myself to spoil their enjoy- 
ment." Of course, this is not all conscious. 
Much of it is entirely unconscious. It can 
co-exist with a measure of exterior devo- 
tion. The victims are let alone as a rule. 
People recognize that such cases are gen- 
erally incurable and do not risk their peace 
of mind and perhaps reputations by ex- 
postulations. It takes a stout heart to 
reclaim a salt marsh. 

But what a living encouragement, what 
a trumpet note of power is sent forth by 
those who cause men to rub their eyes 
and lift their heads and take heart again 
at indomitable cheerfulness and spirits on- 
ly ennobled by pain and sorrow ! Such rare 
souls do not realize the good they do, but 
they will one day when good deeds are 
counted. Meanwhile as a bit of sane phil- 



THE FUTILITY OF BITTERNESS. 25 

osophy, think over my friend's remark: 
"I do not understand embitterment as the 
result of anything." 



GREAT AND LITTLE MEN. 



OME men are moulded intellectually 
on large lines and for good or ill 
are destined to play a controlling 
part in the affairs of the world. 
They are few, and it is better so, for other- 
wise the earth would be a battle-ground 
of Titans. 

Other men — and they are the great 
majority — are cast in a small mould and 
are unable to do much good or harm. This, 
too, is providential, for the labor of the 
world must be performed by a multitude 
of small men, each working in his own 
place and doing his part. 

It has always been so from the begin- 
ning of history and under all kinds of 
government. It is a fixed and immutable 
law that a few, stronger, wiser and more 
energetic than their neighbors, shall 
dominate, while the rest shall be domi- 
nated. It is the hierarchy of ability which 
no man can disestablish. 



GREAT AND LITTLE MEN. 27 

Men of extraordinary power and energy 
are urged on by the force of genius. Theirs 
is the unerring insight, the breadth of out- 
look, the capacity for doing things by 
wholesale and commanding the situation 
at a glance. 

They cannot be men of details, for details 
eat time, yet they must possess the gift of 
comprehending details in the flash of an 
eye. The commander of an army or the 
head of a giant corporation cannot burden 
his memory or waste his days with the 
thousand small things which, for all their 
smallness, must be well and faithfully 
done. He selects others to look after such 
things, and on the accuracy of this selec- 
tion depends the success of the leader. 
Moreover he must imbue with his own 
spirit those who work for him that he may 
see with a hundred eyes and act with a 
hundred hands, for there is much to do 
and the time is short. 

It matters little in what century or in 
what circumstances a great man is born. 
He grasps events and sways them. He 
comes to his own by inalienable right. No 



THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 



one may lift the sword Excalibur except 
Arthur. But he pays a high price for this. 
He knows little peace. It is his lot to be 
criticized unsparingly, for he cannot be 
overlooked. Like St. Peter's or the Colos- 
seum, great men fill the eye of the be- 
holder ; their lightest word is remembered, 
their smallest act recorded, their slightest 
failing the theme of endless comment. 
Thus it is that every man of power goes 
into history maligned and vilified, for he 
becomes a shibboleth and stirs the passions 
of his time. 

Small men are blessed in their limita- 
tions. They are content in a narrow field, 
happy in simple duties and pleasures. 
They are spared the call of action, the 
spur of ambition and the tongue of 
calumny. It is their good fortune to be 
fashioned for the quality of the work they 
do and the places they must fill, and, if 
we look at life from the standpoint of con- 
tentment, they are doubtless the happiest 
people in the world. Were they to be 
raised to high places they would die of 
misery, for, though they would not lack 



GREAT AND LITTLE MEN. V;9 

abuse from others, their most merciless 
critics would be themselves. So they 
gravitate into their allotted places and 
fulfil the law of their being. 

Sometimes, however, small men fancy 
they possess eminent ability and grasp 
and, like the luckless frog who would vie 
with the elephant, burst themselves with 
striving. Once in a while some man of 
meager mental equipment w T hose sole large 
quality is self-conceit is lifted by chance 
or unwise friends into high position, and 
his frantic attempts to meet its require- 
ments are painfully grotesque. The pub- 
lic laughs and winks, but he notices 
nothing. Like the demented individual 
who imagines himself an emperor, the 
conceited small man in great place is happy 
in his delusion, a self-admirer with few 
rivals, a petty paranoiac. But all this is 
exceedingly unfortunate for others. They 
pay the full vicarious penalty for his mis- 
takes, his posing, his unfitness. The very 
incongruity of the situation is painful. 

Most communities are afflicted with 
small men in important offices. This is 



30 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 



one of the main reasons why villainy 
thrives, needed work remains undone, and 
time and money are wasted. Happily, un- 
der democratic government there is a 
chance of getting rid of the incubus. Some- 
times, however, he is a life-incumbent and 
then it is that the wide range of his de- 
ficiencies is disclosed and the full measure 
of his costliness realized. 

The greatest men cannot do all things 
well. No one can satisfy the whole public. 
Life at best is a series of experiments and 
compromises and even the wisest and most 
far-sighted make their mistakes. But 
these mistakes are valuable and the public 
reaps the benefit. Such drawbacks are 
to be expected in human nature and throw 
into higher relief what is well accom- 
plished. 

When great positions are greatly filled, 
the affairs of the community are properly 
and intelligently administered, needed re- 
forms instituted and public confidence 
maintained. The very fallibility and 
natural human weaknesses of the gifted 
administrator and tribune of the people 



GREAT AND LITTLE MEN. 81 

draw men to him by the cords of Adam. 
Through the ruck and seeming confusion 
of action the purpose of the great leader 
is gradually revealed until finally men 
rub their eyes and realize that the 
right hand is at the helm — though some- 
times this recognition does not come until 
the helmsman is cold in death. But it 
must come in time, for truth is mighty and 
shall prevail and the common judgment 
of men is finally right. 

"The evil that men do lives after them ; 
the good is oft interred with their bones/' 
said the poet. But in the case of really 
great men the reverse is true ; their frail- 
ties are laid away in the coffin, but what 
they have won for their brethren lives on 
and works beneficence. The new provinces 
annexed, the discoveries perfected, the 
wise government established, the bound- 
less legacies of genius, are the property of 
mankind. The great man dies when his 
time comes, but humanity thrives and 
wins. 



THE MIRAGE. 



XWANT to get out," said the star- 
ling. This is not a world of con- 
tented people. Nearly every one 
finds his lot in life unsatisfactory 
and wastes time in vain regrets. He mag- 
nifies his own troubles and minimizes those 
of his neighbors. If you could look into 
the hearts of those about you, it would be 
found that almost all are in the same con- 
dition as yourself, beating their soul wings 
against the bars of circumstance, like the 
starling. Each human being is in his own 
cage and the world is a huge cage around 
them all. Analyze the situation. 

Take the monarch. He is the prize pris- 
soner. Birth, etiquette, precedent, for- 
eign relations are the bars of his' cage. Of 
course he wants to get out. Those who 
have tried it by abdication have found 
themselves living in an environment for 
which they were not fitted. He is born 
in captivity and freedom is not for him. 
Take the millionaire, the rich business 



THE MIRAGE. 33 



man. Responsibilities, plans, the plots of 
rivals, the fluctuations of the market are 
the bars of his cage. He may long for the 
old home where his boyhood was spent and 
desire to confront the world care free. Im- 
possible. The myriad threads of affairs 
hold him down as the Lilliputians held Gul- 
liver. He cannot get away. Take the aver- 
age man. He is snugly ensconced in his 
own particular cage. Bread and butter, 
the welfare of his family are contingent 
on his close application to the work before 
him. Of course he would like to go forth 
to strange lands, have plenty of money 
and no anxieties. He may as well dream 
of owning empires. He is caged. 

But perhaps the tramp and the gipsy 
are free. They go where they like, with- 
out worries or family ties. Yes, and they 
frequently go to the prosaic and very prac- 
tical lock-up. They carry their cages. They 
are ambulatory prisoners. Then again 
they are pariahs. Every man's hand is 
against them. Jack London's stories will 
not tempt many boys to take up tramping 
as a quest for happiness. Still, we cannot 
deny it; the longing is there in high and 



34 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 

low. Humanity re-echoes the cry of the 
starling : "I want to get out." 

Let us study this longing. The ana- 
tomists find in the human body certain or- 
gans whose usefulness is obscure, like the 
appendix, which seems to menace its host 
with death. They call these rudimentary 
organs. They say that these once had a 
function, but changed conditions have eli- 
minated that function. It may be, I speak 
in all humility, that this universal longing 
is a rudimentary soul function which had 
its exercise before Adam fell. Though hu- 
man nature is weakened and debased, per- 
haps it still conserves that faculty for en- 
joyment granted to our First Parents 
when the Lord placed them in Paradise, 
and this terrible longing is only part of 
our punishment. However, here we are, 
each in his cage. What are we going to 
do about it? 

It is a consolation to know that the cage 
is the common lot of all. Much of our 
trouble comes from the error that we alone 
are confined and others are free. No one 
is free. It is merely a matter of cages. 
Secondly, let us distrust the imagination. 



THE MIRAGE. 35 



Like fire it is a good servant but a bad 
master. The dream city is very fair, with 
its glistening towers and fairy palaces ris- 
ing on the far horizon, but no one can live 
in it. It is a tantalizing allurement. The 
poets and romancers have a heavy account 
to render for unfitting mankind for the 
world in which life must be lived. There 
is no Arcadia except in poesy. "Shepherds 
all and maidens fair" is very pretty and 
very impractical. They are dream shep- 
herds and dream maidens. The mind must 
come back after the dream, tenfold sad- 
dened for the fugitive peep into a fairy- 
land which cannot be ours. 

We make fun of Betty, the cook, as she 
pores over stories of handsome heroes and 
grand ladies sauntering and love-making 
in great houses. We laugh as we see her 
enrapt and fancying herself one of that 
charmed circle. Betty ought to be doing 
her washing or cleaning her dishes instead 
of mingling in fancy with that gay throng. 
Doubtless. But are not we as ludicrous, 
closing our eyes to our blessings and con- 
solations, and wishing ourselves in other 
people's shoes? 



36 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

Betty may be silly, but not one whit 
more than we. The only difference is that 
her surroundings make the picture more 
grotesque. Contentment lies along the 
path of duty. We cannot attain it by by- 
paths. The digression procures for us 
only scratches and contusions. Keep to 
the road. 

What is the use of denying facts and 
shutting our eyes like children, of running 
after every will-o'-the-wisp that may lead 
us only to sorrow and disillusion ! 

God has placed us in a world just fair 
enough to be unsatisfactory, to make us 
long for a fairer world. He so intended it. 
The longing that besets us, whether we 
acknowledge it or not, is a longing for 
Heaven. God alone can satisfy the heart 
of man. Let us therefore wait for Him, 
taking life cheerfully and bravely. When 
the longing to be free comes, let us think 
of that heavenly country where the soul 
will enjoy its fullest exercise. When the 
dream city shines before our eyes on the 
far horizon, let us take it as an omen and 
a forecast of that Celestial City prepared 
for our eternal dwelling. We shall all get 



THE MIRAGE. 37 



out one day, but our ultimate freedom de- 
pends on facing life nobly in the cage. 



SARCASM. 



05 



HAT spiteful sprite visits the cradles 
of many gifted men and adds to 
the talents with which kindly 
nature endows them, the one fatal 
gift too many, sarcastic wit! It has 
wrecked the careers and embittered the 
days of hundreds who might have done 
much with their lives. They seemed to 
have every quality of leadership except 
one. Their bitter tongues alienated those 
who might have been their devoted liege- 
men, stung sensitive acquaintances to life- 
long enmity and bred distrust and dislike 
in the public generally. There is no need 
to call the roll of the brilliant spirits who 
threw away the hopes of a life-time and 
the certainty of long and fruitful service 
for the sake of sharp epigrams. They 
were the victims of their own vanity. 

People enjoy a stinging retort, a bitter 
jest, when they are not the target. A 
faculty for sarcastic abuse is an asset to a 



SARCASM. 39 



political party, but the party members do 
not like the man of jibes a whit the better 
for using him, and bring their confidence 
and respect to the slow, kindly neighbor 
who speaks plain words. They do not de- 
mand that their leaders be "fellows of in- 
finite jest/' and are satisfied with earnest- 
ness and seriousness. The solemn, states- 
manlike pose is often overdone, but the 
popularity of the counterfeit only proves 
the value of the reality. 

Wise leaders of men are as careful about 
the use of wit and sarcasm as the reliable 
contractor is of high-power explosives. 
There are times when these must be em- 
ployed as there are times when dynamite 
must be used to save a burning city, but 
these occasions are rare. Men will bear 
with violence and temper and even a de- 
gree of bullying, for masterful men have 
had the trick of imperiousness since the 
world began. The soreness caused by hard 
words soon wears away, but sarcasm car- 
ries a poison that festers in the memory 
for years. 

One fact which renders the use of sar- 



46 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

castic wit such an unf orgiveable offence is 
that the majority are powerless before it; 
they cannot answer, but they can and 
do resent it, feeling its unfairness 
The man of bitter tongue who employs it 
wantonly and frequently against his 
neighbors is as cruel and contemptible as 
the brute who strikes a woman or the des- 
perado who shoots an unarmed man. He 
is a social menace who will receive no 
mercy. 

Fortunately, sarcastic genius is rare. 
Some, like Whistler, cultivate it and re- 
joice in making enemies, but almost in- 
variably it is a curse to its possessors. 
They have their reward, it is true. Their 
phrases are handed down for generations 
as classics of epigram and achieve for 
their authors an acrid immortality, but 
this is a poor sort of success. ' 

There is a class of men who wish to be 
sarcastic, but lack the faculty that wings 
the barbed word like an arrow. They are 
merely spiteful. They have the nasty dis- 
position and poison sac of the rattlesnake, 
but are fangless. The sarcastic genius in- 



SARCASM. 41 



vents something, his wit though stinging 
has a malign power, but the spiteful man 
contributes to the sum of human activities 
nothing better than a smirk, a depreciat- 
ing titter, a petty sneer. He does not 
create ; he hisses. There is something mag- 
nificent about a mind that coins the phrase 
which will live as long as the language in 
which it is uttered ; but the mean disposi- 
tion that creates nothing, accomplishes 
nothing, praises nothing, and is content 
with impotent scoffing at the efforts and 
success of other men, works its own con- 
dign punishment. Some people of this 
type have good qualities and think they 
are of value to the world. It is a disposi- 
tion of Providence that they fail to see 
themselves as others see them, the pitiful 
embodiment of a snarling sneer. 

Once or twice in a century a man is born 
with the wondrous faculty of mirroring 
forth the words and doings of mankind in 
mirthful guise, of touching with the fairy 
wand of wit our vanities and shortcom- 
ings, of giving us sound philosophy and 
life-lore in lines of magic laughter, who 



42 THE USES OP ADVERSITY 

contrive to be sarcastic yet never unkind. 
Such men are benefactors of the race ; Josh 
Billings, Artemas Ward, Eugene Field, 
who are gone, and the genial Mr. Doo- 
ley who is still with us. Long after they 
are dust men and women will be glad- 
dened by their merry thoughts, sad hearts 
will be lightened and weary brains fresh- 
ened by the works of these golden-hearted 
humorists. There is no poison on their 
shafts, no bitterness in their epigrams. 
They have made life brighter for us all. 
May their tribe increase, the sod rest 
lightly upon their heads in death and may 
the Lord be kind to them as they were 
kind to their fellowmen! 

But woe betide the public man who sets 
up for a wit. Once he has donned the 
livery of Harlequin, he can never take it 
off. It is a shirt of Nessus. Men will 
applaud his witticisms and repeat his epi- 
grams and accord him all they give the 
gifted clown, but their respect he can 
never gain, no matter what his merits. 
The public mind has an abiding distrust 
of the joker. 



SARCASM. 43 



Such brilliancy never made a friend, but 
countless enemies. It blesses neither him 
who gives nor him who receives. It is more 
dreaded than poison and more hated than 
sin. The counsel I would give a brother 
who feels within him this evil genius for 
making others squirm and rousing the 
laugh of jeering applause is: throttle it as 
it were a cobra, for otherwise you will live 
to see the death of your last hope and the 
back of your last friend and when you are 
gone, men will say: "Thank God, there is 
one bitter tongue the less in this world." 



THE OPEN MIND. 



H~]GE and life are very relative terms. 
Many men are old at thirty and 
youth smiles from the eyes of oth- 
ers who have passed the seventieth 
milestone. The real distinction is between 
the open and the closed mind. The aver- 
age man early becomes indifferent and 
case-hardened. He falls into ruts and 
does not take the trouble to get out of 
them. He takes the attitude that it is 
foolish to spend time on anything that is 
not of immediate use and has not to do 
with the personal money problem. He 
reverts to type. 

Comparatively few men who succeed in 
a marked degree or who exhibit high qual- 
ities of resource in a crisis are groove 
men. Of course, success is not' to be tak- 
en as a synonym of money-making, which 
after all is a very crude affair. Nor is 
resource to be interpreted as the faculty 
of doing an ordinary act at a critical time. 
Success and resource come from the open 
mind. 



THE OPEN MIND. 45 

The great benefactors of mankind were 
enabled to accomplish much by close 
observation of men and things and 
an intelligence that accepted each new 
phenomenon as having a bearing on their 
work. Creative ability in literature comes 
to its own and delights readers because 
they who have it and utilize it let nothing 
escape them in the world in which they 
live. The smallest traits of individuals, 
the tricks of physiognomy, the moving ef- 
fects of passion and conscience, are all 
filed away almost unconsciously, and ev- 
ery day adds to the collection and corrects 
it. Great writers of fiction are of necessity 
men whose minds are as sensitive as 
photographic plates. 

The great inventors have all their lives 
been wide-awake to every small happen- 
ing in inanimate nature. Those who gave 
us the steam-engine and the electric dyna- 
mo, communication by wire and wireless 
and all that long list of appliances that 
are today household words, solved their 
delicate problems and perfected their ma- 
chines because they were ever alert for 
anything new in their chosen fields. The 



46 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

journeyman toils mechanically in his 
place; the inventor is ceaselessly ex- 
pectant. He may have done a bit of 
work a thousand times, yet he is on the 
watch for the next time when a slight 
deviation may unfold to him a secret. 

The masters of souls, the men by whose 
instrumentality miracles of grace have 
been wrought were men to whom each one 
who sought them was as a book newly 
opened. Average spiritual advisers divide 
people into groups as one sorts vegetables, 
but the sages of the spiritual life know that 
each soul is a distinct entity and demands 
a minute inspection. 

The attitude is the same, one of vigilant 
expectancy. The conclusion of yesterday 
may at any moment be modified by the 
developments of today. One has said that 
genius consists in seeing what others are 
looking at. Any other position is indi- 
cative of mental laziness, and means the 
loss of valuable material and knowledge. 
With certain exceptions, each character of 
fiction, each important discovery of 
mechanics and science, each great truth of 
the higher life, were passed unheeded by 



THE OPEN MIND. 47 

myriads until the right men came and 
made them their own. 

We are often bored by the insatiable 
curiosity of children. In a measure, it is 
a faculty we all had once, but killed by 
neglect. We go through life incessantly 
grouping experiences. The alert mind does 
indeed group them also, but always with 
an eye for something which cannot rightly 
be filed in the allotted places prepared. 
A certain Oriental, who sojourned long 
among us, was famed for his cease- 
less questions. Reporters went to inter- 
view him and instead were subjected to 
analytic probing. Personages called to see 
him and met the same fate. That man 
has been able to do wonders for his own 
country by reason of the searching ex- 
amination he gave to every denizen of the 
Western hemisphere who ever met him. 
He was the personification of the open 
mind. 

A singular acquaintance, who recently 
called upon me, stated that the great mys- 
tery is "that which is called life/' It was 
his opinion that three books were worth 
study: — White's "Selborne," Thoreau's 



48 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

"Walden Pond" and Walton's "Angler." 
He said that these three men had given 
life real study. He also remarked that 
nothing in the world was devoid of interest 
and that a really wise man could write 
volumes on the turning of a worm. Fabre 
immortalized himself by studying insects. 
But the boon of an open mind to the 
ordinary man is its bounty to himself. 
It exorcises melancholy, enlivens monot- 
ony and makes each new day a progress 
through some room of a wonderful mu- 
seum. Humanity, in the mass, is a sleep- 
ing world. The wondrous pageant sweeps 
by unseen. But here and there are a few 
— too few — who remain awake, and in the 
intervals of our slumber they tell us what 
we have missed. They are the men of the 
open mind. 



COMPROMISE. 



0"|NE of David Graham Phillips* short 
stories is called "The Compro- 
Y /[$M mise." It dealt with two strong and 
clear-eyed people, a man and a 
woman who, after marriage started to 
conserve their ideals and succeed. These 
ideals involved principle. Both found out 
that adherence to the ideals would cost 
success and both compromised. 

The world progresses by a compromise 
of non-essentials, but each compromise in 
real essentials retards that progress. In 
the latter case the individual for personal 
success enacts, to some degree, the traitor 
to the cause all are bound to uphold. 
Though the individuals may not appreci- 
ate it, each act of such a nature weakens 
the moral fibre of the race, just as each 
divorce strikes at marriage and each poli- 
tical deal makes honest government more 
difficult. 

One of the basic truths the modern 
world is fatally learning to forget it that 



50 THE USES OP ADVERSIT1. 

rejection of compromise in essentials must 
continue in individuals if society is to en- 
dure. The price has nothing to do with 
the question. From the beginning of the 
world the best men and women have paid 
the price unflinchingly and that is one 
reason why the world is as good as it is 
today, in spite of myriad evil agencies. It 
is the individual citizen who saves the 
State by being faithful in his own place, 
great or small. It is the individual soldier 
who saves the army by doing his whole 
duty of whatever sort. If people could 
understand that each such crisis in their 
own lives is not merely a personal matter, 
but a cosmic matter, they would think 
long before deadening conscience with 
shifts and sophistries. 

In the long run, moreover, the compro- 
miser who stoops to win, loses. There can 
be no winning that involves loss of self-re- 
spect. The Christian who fails at the 
test knows himself to be unworthy of the 
Church. The statesman who truckles to 
retain office knows himself meaner than 
the purchased voter. The merchant who 
cheats because others do, knows himself 



COMPROMISE. 51 



for a thief. There can be no winning for 
men who resort to such practices. 

The man who stands to his guns where 
principle is involved will not go empty- 
handed when he is called to God. He has 
done what in him lay, to promote the com- 
ing of God's Kingdom, the great cause of 
all the centuries. On a lower plane, he 
lives on, as long as there is a man on 
earth who recognizes that stand and is 
heartened by it. As the consequences 
of one evil deed are endless, so are those 
of a good deed. Did Mr. Reed fail when 
he refused to purchase the Presidency at 
the price of his principles ? Not at all. He 
will be honored in history when many 
Presidents are forgotten. Did Mr. Cleve- 
land fail when he fought against all odds 
for good government, was called a traitor 
to his party and left for the nonce aban- 
doned by all except a few? Not a bit of 
it. The day is coming when Cleveland will 
stand in history beside other great Amer- 
icans, because he would not compromise 
essentials. 

The outlook for Christianity in the Wes- 
tern world is not inspiring. What, hu- 



52 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

manly speaking, has been the great sol- 
vent, the main agency of decay ? Compro- 
mise. You can discern its destructive ef- 
fects in every religious organization out- 
side the Catholic Church. What has been 
the hidden power behind that Church, that 
has kept her steadfast to the right at all 
costs ? The Holy Spirit, who strengthened 
her representatives against compromise 
in the essentials of faith and morals. 

If there is any one lesson that the mod- 
ern temporazing generation needs to learn 
more than another, it is this same truth: 
that compromise in essentials is ruinous 
for the individual and the organization 
and that the contributory agents of the 
ruin are individuals. 

Temptation normally presents the thin 
end of the wedge to the tempted. He is 
told that it is a small matter, that he 
must look out for himself, that good men 
have yielded before. 

Despite all the cries of wild-eyed re- 
formers, who yell that every city is cor- 
rupt to the core, it is not so much the open 
vice, the shameless deals made almost pub- 
licly, the looting of a community by dis- 



COMPROMISE. 63 



honest politicians. It is rather, as Phil- 
lips states, the hold of the machine, some 
sort of a hold, on men of principle and high 
character, seemingly absolutely indepen- 
dent and actually almost so. The hold 
exists because the men of principle, to 
gain something they wanted, have more 
or less compromised that principle, and too 
late find out that the thread has become a 
cable. The quarry of the bad politician 
is not bad men — he can get them cheap — 
but honest men, and knowing that he can- 
not bring them to open dishonesty, he in- 
duces them to compromise some principle 
for honor, trade or advantage. It is the 
cunning network of such strings that holds 
down the Gulliver of civic honesty. Again 
the indictment is against the individual. 
Life is a system of compromises — in 
non-essentials ; but the life of compromise 
in essentials is the vitality of putrefaction. 




RELIABLE MEN. 




HERE are too many people in this 
country who think that trickiness 
and sharp dealing are the touch- 
stones of success. Altogether too 
much stress was laid some years ago on 
the financial feats of men whom an 
undeviating justice would have placed 
in jail, but at that time they seemed very 
clever and were pointed out to the youth 
of the land as exemplars. One would hard- 
ly think that such models were needed in 
a country where adulteration, substitution 
and jobbery had become fine arts, but as 
a matter of fact, tricksters were for a 
while, our symbols of success. 

Certain events that have transpired have 
somewhat sobered the public on this head. 
The public pocket nerve suffered several 
sharp twinges that wonderfully stimulated 
the conscience, and it is now quite gen- 
erally recognized that stealing directly or 
indirectly is an indelicate way of amassing 
a fortune. 



RELIABLE MEN. 65 

This gospel of dishonesty was worse 
than useless even for its own sordid ends, 
because nine-tenths of those who heard it 
were unable to imitate the bad examples 
successfully. The sporadic cases of men 
who had risen to prominence by shady 
methods were typical of unusual ability 
misused. It would have required genius 
to duplicate their performances. They who 
looked on and imitated absorbed nothing 
except the cult of dishonesty. 

It placed the idea in many slow brains 
that no one but the fool earned money; 
that sharp men arranged a shell game 
and acquired it easily. The entire ethical 
question of right and wrong was ignored 
as if it were an exploded theory. The 
logical consequences of cutting away from 
the moorings of business honesty were 
inevitable. We have all helped to pay for 
this pernicious preaching. 

It would be a "consummation devoutly 
to be wished" if men, and especially young 
men, were to realize that, apart from any 
higher considerations, honesty is the best 
policy and that it is the reliable man who 



THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 



succeeds in the long run, not the rogue. 

The very men who were responsible for 
the debauchery of business methods illus- 
trated the truth of the adage, for they 
gathered about them faithful and reliable 
employees, "falsely true." If this is the 
rule with financial buccaneers, it is ten fold 
true of reputable business men. 

Every organization must have reliable 
men. They are the stone, steel and con- 
crete of the business edifice. Many other 
qualities are desirable for the up-building, 
promotion and growth of a great enter- 
prise; initiative, alertness, system and so 
on, but reliability is essential. 

The great rewards of life come to those 
who unite in their personalities large men- 
tal grasp, ceaseless activity and dominat- 
ing character, but such men are few. Those 
of lesser gifts must be content with lesser 
rewards. The one path of success to the 
average man is along the lines of faithful 
service. 

Napoleon revolutionized warfare, but he 
had behind him soldiers who idolized their 
leader. He supplied the genius, his men 



RELIABLE MEN. 57 

the faithfulness and courage. The trend 
of modern methods is toward consolida- 
tion. In every department of life large 
organizations, well-planned and superbly- 
officered, are the order of the day. In 
them a man is assessed at his true valua- 
tion as a worker. If he has unusual abil- 
ity, some special gift that makes him valu- 
able to the men at the helm, he is sure of 
advancement — but he must be reliable. 

Brilliant dilletanti we may have from 
time to time, whimsical geniuses who de- 
light us in hours of ease, but we will have 
nothing of them in the strenuous work of 
life. Modern life for men of responsibility 
is an affair of strain. They supply the 
initiative, the push, the plans. What they 
need and must have is a supply of men 
upon whom they can depend ; who will not 
steal or be faithless or careless, but attend 
faithfully to their several departments. 

These adventurers who win every thing 
by an amazing coup, who outwit the old 
campaigners, almost invariably lose every- 
thing by an equally amazing coup. One 
might as well take a tight-wire artist as 



58 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

a model. The work and business of the land 
is compacted of individuals who, utilizing 
in full measure the abilities with which 
they are endowed, do their best quietly 
and steadily. There is no place for ad- 
venturers, or tricksters on the firing line of 
modern business. Some do appear, but 
gravitate by elimination to the peniten- 
tiary and the madhouse. 

A human organization built up for a 
definite purpose in trade or manufactures 
tends to approach the machine. The effi- 
ciency of a machine depends on the quality 
of the parts and their efficiency. Men hate 
to be called cogs in a human machine, yet 
after all, the organization is democratic in 
this, that all concerned have their part in 
its fitness and effectiveness. It all comes to 
this, little as we may like it; we are cogs 
in the machinery of life, or else we are 
on the scrap-heap. Our practical duty is 
to be good cogs. 




THE CALL OF THE SEA. 



9^]HE warm Spring winds and the stir- 
\*s ring of Nature after the winter's 
sleep awaken in the hearts of 
thousands of inland dwellers a 
longing for the sea. Though the spell that 
the ocean casts over mankind is as ancient 
as the tides, it is today as potent as when 
the returning Greeks from Persia raised 
the joyful shout, "The sea! The sea," or 
Balboa "silent on a peak in Darien" first 
surveyed the Pacific. 

Had not the testimony of ages proved 
that the ocean exerts a magic influence on 
men, we might surmise that national rest- 
lessness or a search for health was the 
reason for the annual hegira of Americans 
to the coast. Both have much to do with 
the migration, but deeper and more far- 
reaching than either is an impulse as sub- 
tle, yet powerful as love or music, an inde- 
finable, inward summons — the call of the 
sea. 

To those who dwell along the shore, who 



60 THE USES OF ADVERSIT5T. 

are familiar with every mood of that 
changeful element, life holds an ever-pres- 
ent phase of the unexpected and a novelty 
that rarely palls. They live on the border 
line of the mysterious and unfathomable, 
but in truth it is only they who, loving the 
sea, must pass their days far away from 
it, or they who were cradled among moun- 
tains or on prairies, enjoy to the full 
capacity of their being the enchanting 
mystery of the deep. 

What swimmer can ever be content in 
land-locked lake or tepid river, who has 
breasted the Atlantic, plunged through its 
giant rollers and been swept in on the crest 
of its foam-flecked breakers ? The river is 
dead, the lake a listless medium, but the 
sea is joyously, aggressively alive. A man 
may love the city's roar, he may expe- 
rience the deep peace of the mountains, but 
the ocean's thunder soothes and its rock- 
born spray is as strong wine to the hearts 
of men. 

Even for those whom sickness or weari- 
ness condemns to inactivity, who can only 
feast their eyes on the changing pageant 
of the waters, watch the golden moon-path 



THE CALL OF THE SEA. 61 

across the undulating surface or the toss- 
ing waves of the sea-horses in storm, 
there is nepenthe in the sea. 

One recalls Mr. Blaine's eloquent and 
pathetic funeral oration over President 
Garfield, when he speaks of the dying 
man's longing for the sea, his hope that 
health would return to him near the ocean 
where he would be lulled to sleep by the 
sound of its myriad voices. It expresses 
so well the yearning of sick soul or stricken 
body for that mighty, distant music — the 
call of the sea. 

Who can sing a new song of the ocean ! 
The sweetest singers, the most gorgeous 
painters of word-pictures have done their 
best, and the world knows it by heart. But 
the influence that inspired them all is en- 
dowed with immortal youth ; it sweeps the 
heart-strings of prosaic beings, making 
soundless music, thrilling mankind from 
age to age. Doubtless the jaded occu- 
pant of the Twentieth Century is filled 
with the same delightful awe as he gazes 
over the wide blue waters, as that which 
stirred the first man who stood on the 



62 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

verge of a continent, rapt in that moving 
mystery, the sea. 

It may be the same the world over, this 
summer exodus to the coast, but there 
must be a difference in the older coun- 
tries, where the people are rooted in 
their own ground and attached to the home 
roof -tree. In some way they have lived 
longer than we and lost that curious hope- 
fulness which is such a marked character- 
istic of our people. The American is no- 
madic; his household gods are set up on 
wheels. His environment incites him to 
change. As Spring approaches the jour- 
nals and magazines put forth their leaves 
of alluring advertisements, and every bill- 
board blooms into pictures of seashore de- 
lights. Nature, trade and his own rebelli- 
ous heart conspire to transport him sea- 
ward, and he needs must go. 

Even under modern conditions the 
breaking up of a household and its tempo- 
rary establishment elsewhere are expen- 
sive and troublesome. Grown-up people 
feel this keenly. It dulls the pleasure of a 
summer vacation, for domestic and finan- 
cial anxieties flourish under any sky. 



THE CALL OF THE SEA. 63 

Not so with the child. To him the pack- 
ing of trunks is a joyful portent. To him 
expressmen are invested with mystic dig- 
nity. The rush of the train and the chang- 
ing scene are a continuous entertainment. 
When finally the journey ends, and the 
ocean is spread out for his benefit, his joy 
is unalloyed. Never was there such a sea 
before, such fields of sand, such rocks and 
grass. His are the wide acreage of blue 
sky, the boundless expanse of waves. The 
wind is his, too. All this heritage of Na- 
ture belongs to the little boy until that sad 
day, when he passes out through the por- 
tals of childhood. The elders have their 
games and schemes in the social field, the 
artificial things .that enliven tired people at 
a summer resort, but the child dwells in a 
delightful country of his own. 

All hearts respond to the ocean's sum- 
mons, but not always in equal measure. 
Only in those early golden days do we ever 
understand the secret of the sea, by simply 
feeling it. None but childish eyes 
see the strange and elusive beings who 
people the deep. We have seen them long 
ago. We have heard them, when we were 



64 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

small and innocent, above the booming 
surges, the noisy pebbles and the wind. 
Loud and clear they came to our childish 
ears, the ring of elfin laughter and the 
peal of fairy trumpets — the call of the sea. 



UNCONSCIOUS POETS. 



DOUBTLESS the best poetry is never 
written. Man has a boundless ca- 
WJM pacity for feeling* and only a li- 
mited faculty of expression. Poe- 
try is not professional verse-making. Verse 
is the vehicle, not the motive power. The 
poet is one who sees a vision and strives 
to reproduce it in words, as the painter 
tries to reproduce his on canvas or the 
sculptor in marble. The basic thing is 
the vision. 

The mechanical process is the great dif- 
ficulty of those to whom the Muse com- 
mandingly whispers: "Sing." It is the 
same task that confronts the painter or 
sculptor who is bidden to re-create with 
brush or chisel the immortal children who 
dance adown the vales of fancy. It is men- 
tal parturition and means agony of soul. 
This is the chief reason why the number 
of accredited poets is so small. 

He who would express beautiful 
thoughts may scorn rhyme as Whitman 
did or he may take the easy way of blank 



66 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

verse, but he must prove his case and 
show his message if men are to listen, for 
poetry to most men means rhyme. "Vers- 
libre," must produce its evidence. On the 
other side is the danger of taking tinkling 
verses for poetry without regard to the 
thought conveyed. This is responsible for 
endless reams of doggerel. 

It is often said now that poetry is out 
of fashion. Poetry is never out of fashion, 
for in truth every man is more or less, in 
his own way, a poet. Poetry is as much 
a part of life as air and sunshine, but the 
consecrated form of expression has been 
crowded out by other things. Men prefer 
to read ideas printed so as to fill columns 
rather than those with white spaces on 
both sides. Men have heard so many 
rhymes in popular songs, so much tuneful 
nonsense, that they tire of rhymes telling 
of the empyrean. 

Gray immortalized the "mute, inglori- 
ous Milton." The poets I have in mind 
may be inglorious but they are by no 
means mute. In former times the bard 
stood in the market-place. You may find 
him there today. The only difference is 



UNCONSCIOUS POETS. 67 

that the whole country has become one 
vast market-place and the bards are every- 
where. 

Every man is a poet when he mounts 
his hobby. The cobbler has his Pegasus. 
He may not stop to arrange his song in 
lines of accepted form, but when he speaks 
of the things nearest his heart he waxes 
poetical. The bridge-builder, the engineer 
and the commercial traveller all give rein 
to fancy when they touch the main work 
of their lives. 

It was a trait of the old bards to be 
borne away on the wings of imagination, 
to leave the world of the senses for that 
strange and wondrous country whose mem- 
ories linger in the recesses of the brain. 
They sang of hard battles, the stroke of 
spear on shield, the dust and gore of war, 
and anon would paint word-pictures of 
youths and maidens dancing in the twi- 
light on the rich meadow, as did Homer in 
his description of the shield of Achilles. 
The bard burst forth into song because 
he loved these things. 

You may find the bard anywhere; in 
sober office or swiftly moving train. He 



68 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

may wear a frock coat or a week's growth 
of beard, but you can always be sure of 
one thing; if you touch the right note, 
that thing of life in which he is most inter- 
ested, he will sing. You must reach his 
sub-conscious mind, let him forget himself 
and be wafted into the realm where his 
fancy dwells. Then he will tell you of bat- 
tles, dreams and ambitions, the thoughts 
that lie in the deep places of his soul. It 
may be something that the world accepts 
as a grand and inspiring theme ; it may be 
some common w r onder like the making of 
things out of steel or making steel do 
things with the aid of steam and the light- 
ning, but at all events he will talk poetry, 
he will light up his narrative with the 
flame of imagination, he will invoke the 
Muse to tell his story better. He is an 
unconscious poet. 

Mayhap the poems we admire most are 
stolen property. The man of verses sat 
by the man of visions and listening to the 
words poured forth in rich disorder, gath- 
ered them up and gave them to the world 
as his own. Our great books are filled with 
folks who were kidnapped. The story 



UNCONSCIOUS POETS. 69 

writer appropriated their personalities and 
mental processes and compelled them to 
slave forever in his books. I fear too that 
the poets will have a heavy account to ren- 
der for the poems they have stolen from 
the farmer, the soldier and the sailor, the 
visions of other men incorporated into 
their smooth and silvery verses. 

The professional poet does not own the 
universe. The glories of sun and sky and 
tempest, the beating of stormy seas, the 
laughing meadow and still, smiling forest 
belong to all who have the eyes to see their 
beauty. It is in the artistic expression 
that the monopoly consists. I have heard 
noble poems from the lips of men who 
never wrote a verse, men who had wrestled 
all their lives with elemental things. Yet 
they had the poet's vision, they could tell 
in winged words of the things they had 
seen. Often they have made me think of 
old Homer, these gnarled and wrinkled 
journeymen of labor. 

Poetry will never die while men live ; for 
the world of men is filled with it. The 
verse-maker may scoff and call it fustian, 
but the poet like the poor man, is always 



70 THE USES OP ADVERSITY 

with us. He may swing the hammer or hold 
the reins, he may watch the loom or the 
market, but if he has the proper encour- 
agement and a sympathetic listener, if the 
thing dearest to his heart is mentioned, he 
will, like the old, blind bard, lift up his 
voice and sing of the things he loves. 



HEROES AND VALETS. 



QO man is a hero to his valet." He 
who coined that phrase had no love 
for valets. Doubtless many people 
knowing themselves to be very un- 
heroic, take a fearful joy in repeating the 
words, but it is with the melancholy satis- 
faction of the discomfited spell-binder who 
would pelt the statue of Webster with 
aged eggs. In truth, the sting of the 
sarcasm, like that of the bee, is in its tail. 
Tiie phrase-maker conned the list of all 
who would be associated with a hero in 
one capacity or another and would appre- 
ciate him, and at the end of the list he 
came on the valet, as the one being most 
likely to vilify a great man. It is a sort of 
a survival of the unfittest. 

The phrase-maker knew human nature 
too well to say that no man is a hero to 
his wife or mother, for these skilful arti- 
ficers can manufacture heroes out of the 
most unpromising material. He did not 
insinuate that a man's chums smile know- 



72 THE USES OF ADVTDRSITT. 

ingly when he is called a hero, for a man's 
chums are his best allies under all circum- 
stances. Nor did he hint that a great 
commander is no hero to his men, for these 
would wade through blood to lay the laurel 
on his brow. No. He pointed out the one 
individual petty enough to belittle a great 
man. 

It is a curious fact that sincere admira- 
tion means kinship of soul with the one 
admired. A man's wife or mother would 
gladly give her life for him. His friends 
would beggar themselves in his service. 
His men would march to the cannon's 
mouth to recover his body. All this goes 
to show that in order to appreciate a hero 
you must be a bit of one yourself. 

Now look on the other side. What man- 
ner of human is the average valet? He is 
the sort who smokes his master's cigars 
and drinks his wine, talks him over among 
other valets, and who would shiver if you 
pointed a tooth-brush at him. By the very 
nature of his trade he is a colorless per- 
sonality whose days are spent in caring 
for the clothes, boots and furnishings of 
another. The ordinary man would prefer 



HEROES AND YALETS. Tl 

digging ditches to such work, but valeting 
has an attraction for a certain type: that 
hates hard work, that loves to strut be- 
fore housemaids, the sort of creature that 
whispers behind his hand to one of his own 
ilk that his master snores like a pig and 
makes noises with his soup when he 
eats alone. If you have need of a sneak, 
search for a man who maligns his em- 
ployer. 

I have no quarrel with valets as a class. 
Doubtless there have been and are mag- 
nanimous persons among them. But I 
have in mind the valet who thinks the 
hero whose boots he blacks an over-rated 
individual. The unthinking public has a 
false idea about celebrated men. It would 
have them always on parade. It would 
shudder at the thought of a popular figure 
in pajamas and night-cap. It would have 
him seen through the glorified haze that 
surrounds Ouida's guardsmen or Richard 
Harding Davis' pattern-panted prigs. In 
short the unthinking public's idea of a 
notable is enbalmed in the masterpieces 
of Laura Jean Libbey. Now the valet class 
represents a section of the unthinking pub- 



74 THB USES OF ADVERSITY. 

lie in close menial relations with a great 
man. 

Even the conscientious and devoted valet 
has the limitations of his class. All men, 
be they monarchs or ashmen, eat, wash 
themselves and sleep in beds. What dif- 
ferentiates a leader of men from the com- 
mon ruck is power of intellect and char- 
acter, not the cut of his clothes. A man 
may be famous in both hemispheres for 
his learning, his bravery or artistic skill, 
but the menial who lays out his clothes 
thinks of him merely as a master who 
locks up his cigars or has a predilection 
for shocking hats. The trouble with the 
valet is that his view-point is wrong and 
petty. 

There is a variety of human that re- 
volts from what is noble. Conscious of its 
own meanness, its scurviness of soul, it 
seeks to drag down all to its own level. 
We have all longed to stop the vile 
tongues that proclaim no man as honest 
and no woman as pure. Unfortu- 
nately, such people are too well 
represented in the valet class. Then 
there is the result of environment. 



HEROES AND VALETS. 7i 

Put ten men adrift in a boat with- 
out food and cannibalism is likely to re- 
sult. Put ten men in a club, dependent 
on each other in business, society and 
politics, and they will be very careful of 
what they say and do. The poor valet 
has nothing to keep his principles and 
conduct up to the norm. He lives in a 
world of petty, soul-shrinking things. His 
importance among his kind depends upon 
the amount of gossip or scandal he can 
bring to the common fund. 

I have read many books about great 
men, books that were compiled by writers 
with the souls of valets. They relate every 
small circumstance tending to show their 
victims as base clay, every outburst of 
temper, misunderstood remark, every 
backstairs incident and scullery episode, 
and they have caused me to honor and 
pity the great men and women thus de- 
famed by ink-harpies. A man be a hero 
to his valet! The good Lord forbid it! 
That would be the final argument to prove 
the alleged hero was a sham. 



SELF EXPRESSION. 



y**s HUMB prints may be collected by the 
K.J million, yet among them all you will 
find no "duplicates." When sup- 
posed "doubles" are examined 
closely, they will be found to differ in im- 
portant details. The fact is; each indivi- 
dual is unique; there is no other exactly 
like him. This in the domain of the phy- 
sical. In the larger and more complex 
realm of the mental and moral these dif- 
ferences are much intensified. 

If people realized these facts early in 
life and acted on them, the sum of human 
accomplishment would be multiplied. But 
powerful influences are at work to 
convince individuals that they belong in 
this or that class with many others. The 
schools, the tendency of modern business, 
the hard and fast rules and customs of 
life; all tend to quench the fire of origin- 
ality, the beginnings of self expression. 

Another pernicious influence is constant 
companionship. One who is seldom alone 



SELF EXPRESSION. 77 

has his individuality insidiously sapped. 
Thousands live without any conscious 
ideas of their own. They are conveyed 
through life on the thoughts and decisions 
of others. For the proper development of 
natural powers a certain amount of phy- 
sical or at least mental seclusion is essen- 
tial. 

The obstacles to effective accomplish- 
ment are of course innumerable, but the 
main one is not laziness or dissipation or 
lack of opportunity, but lack of confidence 
and the consequent falling into the groove 
habit. Many early in life are conscious of 
a certain bent or talent, but after a half- 
hearted attempt or two give up and drift 
into some work to which accident or the 
need of money diverts them. 

The whole world is hostile to the indivi- 
dual and determined to force him to con- 
form to type. Only the strongest minds 
and wills are able to resist this steady 
pressure and forge ahead on their own 
lines. 

In saying this, there is no intent to advo- 
cate odd or fantastic ways in the ordinary 
affairs of life. Conformity to sensible 



7S THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

fashions, accepted norms of speech and 
manner, is an economy for the individual, 
and indeed aids him in bringing out the 
best there is in him. The fact that certain 
genuises have been so original that this 
quality tempted them to extremes is not 
to the point. 

We are considering what is called the 
average man or woman, and the argument 
is that such people are capable of more 
than they actually perform and the failure 
to express themselves adequately as indivi- 
duals is the result of the world influences 
they encounter and their own lack of con- 
fidence in themselves. 

If you study closely the careers, not 
merely of geniuses, but of ordinary people 
who have accomplished much for them- 
selves and mankind, it will be found that 
they are remarkable for their devotion to 
individuality. This has nothing to do with 
vanity or selfishness and is merely the re- 
cognition of a fact. They were all alike in 
this, that they believed themselves to be 
distinct entities capable of great things if 
they were faithful to the capabilities with- 



SELF EXPRESSION. T9 

in them, and in each instance the result 
proves that they were right. 

There is hardly an example of a man 
or woman who has reached distinction 
where at some period this conflict did not 
rage with the triumph of originality as 
the result. Thousands of parents use every 
influence in their power to eradicate in 
their children this faculty of individuality. 
This parental stupidity and obstinacy are 
most costly to mankind. It is a marked 
trait of those who have an inborn gift of 
some sort, to struggle on to utilize this 
gift to the fullest degree, no matter what 
the obstacles. Few artists or statesmen 
but have had to work as hard to gain an 
opportunity as to utilize that opportunity 
when it had been won. 

Few Americans who have attained emi- 
nence had to struggle against such odds as 
Abraham Lincoln. Authorities may not 
agree that he was a genius, but he was in 
many ways something nobler and more ad- 
mirable, a man who was absolutely true to 
himself and in every crisis of his life ex- 
pressed his individuality on those around 
him; first his community and later on, the 



50 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

nation. Webster, Clay and Calhoun have 
left treasures of eloquence, but not one of 
them or all of them, equals the Gettysburg 
Address. It required more than genius to 
write that; it required a man of excep- 
tional moral fibre, of intense human sym- 
pathy, who all his life lived up to the 
maxim : Know thyself and be true to thy- 
self. 

There is in Lincoln's life and in those of 
scores of great Americans a lesson for 
every young man and woman in the land. 
It is not a lesson of success as such or of 
fame, but a lesson of self expression. 
There is not the smallest doubt that 
thousands who have lived and died in 
obscurity since the formation of this re- 
public have had in them the potentiality 
to equal or surpass the careers of the most 
venerated figures in public life. The "mute, 
inglorious Miltons" were not always mute 
and inglorious because it was their fate to 
accomplish nothing, but because from lack 
of confidence or the despair that comes of 
thwarted effort, they settled back into the 
life-groove of those about them. They may 
have been good men and women, but they 



SELF EXPRESSION. SI 

failed in their duty to themselves. They 
kept their one talent in a napkin and buried 
it in the earth. They failed to develop the 
gift that was within them. Opportunity 
knocked at their doors time and again and 
they heeded it not. Analyzed carefully 
their failure was not intellectual, but mo- 
ral. They had their chances but they lacked 
the courage and perseverance to accept and 
justify them. 

There are hundreds within our own cir- 
cles of acquaintance who possess the capa- 
city to outdo those who are rated as great 
successes, famous people — but they lack 
moral power. It is useless to do anything 
for them; no one can do what should be 
done except themselves. Robert Burns 
might be in this class had not inborn song 
saved him. 

It is the high duty of every man and 
woman to recognize that they are indivi- 
duals with certain gifts w T hose rich and 
fruitful development they owe to God and 
mankind. They may prate of circum- 
stances, the overmastering influences of 
environment, the tyranny of daily work. 
These are not the difficulties, the real trou- 



32 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

ble is with themselves and in themselves — 
lack of courage for self-expression. As 
Emerson somewhere remarks, no one 
knows what he can do until he tries— and 
I add — and keeps on trying until he has 
done it. 



MECHANICAL MILLENIUM. 



yS?]HE wonderful progress of the world 
K.S during the last half century in the 
means of travel, communication and 
manifold conveniences is undeni- 
able. Doubtless the denizen of the early 
Nineteenth Century transported to our 
time and ordinary life would think he had 
awakened to the domination of magic or 
witchcraft. The inhabitants of the globe 
are knit together by the cable and the 
wireless; it is easy to hear the human 
voice and hold a conversation when the 
speakers are thousands of miles apart. It 
is a commonplace to travel in a few hours 
today a distance that years ago would 
have consumed many days. The automo- 
bile has revolutionized travel by turnpike, 
and the housewife of the present day can 
work culinary marvels by the aid of 
electricity. 

Americans are proud of their conquests 
in the realm of mechanics. The man who 
shows you his town or the friend who 



S4 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

takes you through his new house always 
dilates on the "modern appliances" with 
which both are provided. Large numbers 
of our citizens are professionally, or 
financially interested in the perfec- 
tion of practical mechanics, and it is to 
their credit that they are deeply interested 
in them. The number of articles on such 
topics published continuously in our popu- 
lar weeklies and monthlies shows that this 
interest is really a national affair. 

It is not at all surprising, that a man 
like Mr. Tuttle, who had for years been 
the head of a great railroad system and 
had watched the development of traveling 
facilities for more than fifty years, should 
speak with warmth and a certain under- 
current of envy of those who are begin- 
ning life with so many of the mechanical 
helps denied a former generation. The 
personal equation in such cases is simply 
overpowering. 

In times of stress and anxiety ; as when 
friends are on the wide sea at the mercy 
of storm and iceburg, or locked in inac- 
cessible mountains, or isolated otherwise, 
we thank the Lord for the wireless, the 



MECHANICAL MILLENIUM. 86 

telephone and the motor-car, and we do 
well, for there is nothing more heart-rend- 
ing than to be separated from family and 
friends, unable to know whether they are 
alive or dead, and a prey to inconsolable 
anxiety. 

These, however, are extreme instances. 
If, however, we study the current of mod- 
ern life and the humanity carried along 
by it, it is easy to discern that we have 
paid something for the services of the 
three genii: steam, steel and electricity. 
We have become their dependents to such 
a degree that we feel powerless without 
them. 

Few people in the total of our popula- 
tion really understand mechanics ; they ac- 
cept them without proof, as they do the 
Munchausen stories about popularized 
"science." Most of them declare that 
science has eliminated religion. I speak 
here of a class unfortunately large, that 
has never given any real attention to reli- 
gion and has derived whatever informa- 
tion it has — whether true or false — from 
the daily paper. Science, theoretical and 



36 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

applied, has done this part of the commu- 
nity incalculable harm. 

In other realms of modern life mechan- 
ics has extracted its pound of flesh. In 
what may be called the higher life of the 
intellect, in the faculties for the percep- 
tion of art in its varied forms, applied 
science has dulled and killed these powers 
of the mind. 

The fallacy about mechanics is that 
many fancy that physical comfort and 
convenience are the apotheosis of civiliza- 
tion. As in Mark Twain's story : "A Yan- 
kee in King Arthur's Court," a New Eng- 
lander of rather a vulgar sort triumphs 
over the leaders of that far-off age by 
means of his gun and a slight knowledge 
of mechanics. A popular writer of the day 
has made the same mistake in the story 
called : "The Jingo/' in which an American 
of the period turns an isolated mediaeval 
kingdom topsy-turvy by means of the 
commonplaces of present-day American 
life. The wide popularity of tales of this 
type and the artless air of superiority af- 
fected by people who are not producers but 
beneficiaries of mechanics show that a new 



MECHANICAL MILLENIUM. 87 

idolatry has taken possession of the popu- 
lace — or at least a section of it — the idol- 
atry of machinery. 

This, however, is the case generally with 
people who are not familiar with science, 
rightly so-called, either in theory or prac- 
tice, and who have been misled by specious 
articles and books written for the undis- 
cerning. As in every other relation of life, 
surfeit produces a re-action. The modern 
family of wealth, while it is to an extent 
dependent on mechanical conveniences, 
seeks to flee them and emancipate itself 
Every summer the quiet places in the 
mountains and near the sea are occupied 
by an increasing number of those who are 
sick of cities, who wish to be spared the 
ring of the telephone bell, the clang of the 
trolley car, and even that boast of our 
day — electric light. This is a healthy sign. 

It should be remembered that the mas- 
terpieces of human genius were produced 
in an age and by men and women who 
knew nothing about modern mechanical 
conveniences. The greatest works of art in 
sculpture, painting and poetry owe little or 
nothing to this genie: "science", and we 



18 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

are all the poorer when we forget this. 
Mechanical conveniences are all right in 
their place, but that place is a subordinate 
one. The trouble with many of our fellow 
citizens is that they reverse the roles of 
Aladdin and the Genie : they are the slaves 
of the lamp. 

When one hears the silly vaporings 
about "modern science," the "passing of 
Christianity" as a life force, the "ignor- 
ance" of the people of past centuries; 
when we see people accepting with flat- 
tered complacency, their kinship with the 
ape, as told them by some pseudo-scientist, 
and then look back at what humanity has 
done, in days innocent of steam, steel and 
electricity, for the salvation of souls and 
the highest interests of human life, we 
instinctively ask the question: "these thy 
gods, Oh Israel?" 




MURDER AND MONEY. 



Q' ONE who reads a daily paper can 
help remarking the frequency of 
murder in this country — wholesale 
and retail murder. Hundreds of 
lives are snuffed out in a mine, not by 
reason of an unforseen accident, but 
through neglect to take precautions as 
well known in mining circles as the safety 
lamp. Scores are killed or injured in a 
railroad accident because overworked dis- 
patchers make mistakes or risky engin- 
eers take chances in switching on to the 
main line within a minute or two of the 
the coming of an express, or in any of 
the multitudinous ways in which pas- 
sengers arrive in eternity instead of their 
expected destination. Then there are holo- 
causts that are the outcome of fire laws 
neglected or evaded, and the destruction 
of life wrought by those miscreants who 
use dynamite as their agent of death. The 
list is agonizingly long. It seems to be all 
but impossible to place the responsibility 



90 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

of these deaths where it belongs, but in 
one way or another, the reason why the 
criminals are not punished is money. 

More than one hundred men died in a 
mine not long ago because it had not been 
properly sprinkled. Some one ordered the 
cessation of that work, some one who 
knew what would happen sooner or later 
in that mine. And the end of that killing 
is not yet, for many of the widows and 
children of the dead miners will die as a 
consequence of that wilful neglect. 

If the authorities of a railroad deliber- 
ately overwork dispatchers or trainmen 
there can be but one inevitable result, 
and they know it. If the average traveler 
knew to what an extent his life depended 
on a tired youth at a telegraph key he 
would think long before boarding a train. 
If he knew the engineer on whose 
keenness and decision depended the 
lives of those in the coaches, he would 
make inquiry how long it had been since 
the engineer had a night's sleep. 

The railroad officials know these things 
accurately and keep up the practice. Why ? 
Because those officials also know it is al- 



MURDER AND MONET. 91 

most impossible to convict them of the 
consequences of their orders, but the ulti- 
mate reason for their action is money in 
the shape of economy or dividends. 

Over a hundred girls were burned to 
death in a clothing factory a few years 
ago. The camera men spared us none of 
the horrors, and what they failed to do 
the headlines finished. The fire escapes 
of that building could not be reached. Evi- 
dence was printed to the effect that the 
doors leading to them were locked. Yet, 
after weeks of law proceedings, the conclu- 
sion was that no one was guilty. There 
are laws covering the inspection of fire es- 
capes. If these were not inspected, some 
one was paid to overlook it. One would 
like to know exactly what fees the attor- 
neys in that case received after the verdict 
was rendered, just how much, in terms of 
dollars, the whole thing saved the proprie- 
tors of the establishment. 

Retail murder fares nearly as well in 
the courts. If there is enough money to 
hire skilled attorneys, handwriting ex- 
perts and alienists, the most brutal and 
notorious murderer has a far better 



12 THE USES OP ADVERSITT. 

chance of dying of old age than a decent 
citizen. When the accused is poor and the 
evidence sufficiently conclusive, criminal 
procedure works with commendable dis- 
patch, but when money takes its stand at 
the rail with the attorneys for the defence, 
the chances of conviction are slim. 

There is another sinister fact about 
this clogging the wheels of justice: we 
all help pay for it. Every time a cele- 
brated murder case drags its weary length 
through months and even years, the 
county in which the accused is tried pays 
out thousands and sometimes hundreds of 
thousands of dollars. The citizens of 
that county and state pay those expenses. 
So, not only is money used to defeat the 
ends of justice through technicalities, eva- 
sions and the tricks of experts, but the 
taxpayer contributes a part of his income 
to the same end. 

The citizen pays enough to obtain ade- 
quate justice in the community. One of 
the magazine writers gives an exposi- 
tion of the cost of judges. He states that 
there are about three thousand judges in 
this country receiving on an average some 



MURDER AND MONEY. 



thousands of dollars a year each, and it is 
his contention that many of them are paid 
to retard, not facilitate justice. However 
this is but a drop in the bucket. There 
are the phalanx of criminal officers, costly 
court houses, large legal expenses, and 
for all these the citizen pays, with the re- 
sult that corporations come forth scot- 
free from the worst carnival of death and 
the wealthy man escapes the consequences 
of his acts. 

The country is exercised just now over 
the high cost of living, the tariff, unlawful 
combinations in trade and dozens of these 
bugbears of civilization (to call it by the 
conventional name), but there is another 
problem worthy of examination and solu- 
tion, the high cost of injustice in capital 
cases. They tell us that our law comes 
from England. Evidently since importa- 
tion it has been adulterated with money. 




THE MODERN CITY. 



C"|HE average American is never satis- 
fied with anything for long, and old 
gggjjg things are his bugbear. The entire 
stage-setting of modern life is con- 
stantly being shifted in accordance with 
the capricious taste for novelty. The man 
who leaves his home city and lives for a 
decade abroad will have need of a guide 
on his return. Conspicuous landmarks are 
gone, small houses with encompassing 
lawns are replaced by ambitious blocks; 
historic mansions obscured by a growth 
of shoddy tenements, once familiar streets 
glare at him with the studied aloofness of 
the conscious parvenue. 

In a subtle manner the buildings speak 
of the changed conditions of the people. 
In some metropolitan centers this phenom- 
enon may be observed in its extremes. In 
such cities one who is away from home a 
month may come back to find his neigh- 
borhood transformed ; it affects the whole 



THE MODERN CITY. 95 

country and nearly every community is 
bitten by it. 

I have often passed a fine old house 
that for a century and a quarter has stood 
firmly on its granite foundations with the 
dignity and independence of an aged citi- 
zen honored by all. It was not a hand- 
some edifice, but it had self-respect. I 
notice that the owners have fallen victims 
to the vice of modernity and are "restor- 
ing" the centenarian out of all recognition. 
The old timbers seem to cry out: "This is 
a shame !" But the occupants wish to be 
in fashion, and so my old friend is at the 
mercy of the wood surgeons. 

It grates somewhat, this craze for 
renovation, upon one who is so sentimental 
as to love old things for their own sake; 
who takes pleasure in queer fan-lights over 
front doors and chimneys of generous pro- 
portions and window-panes pink wrought 
in the alembic of sunshine. Not that these 
tricks of architecture are much in them- 
selves. It is rather that these substantial 
dwellings are historical records in brick 
and wood. They tell the story as plainly 
fts the printed book. The people of earlier 



16 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

days were content with scant comfort 
from our point of view, yet the annals of 
those days seem to show that they gleaned 
as much from life as we do. Had they felt 
the need of more conveniences, doubtless a 
way to them would have been found. The 
houses show that the occupants found 
them satisfactory. 

In bustling cities these architectural 
veterans have short shrift. They are 
hacked to pieces with undemonstrative 
rapidity, and monstrosities in steel and 
stone desecrate their memory. In smaller 
towns there is a difference. The general 
characteristics of the house are retained, 
but the modern owners imprint a new 
character on the old structure after the 
manner of the palimpsest. The family 
nautilus, finding the shell too restricted, 
makes additions to suit new conditions. 
The same thing took place on a gigantic 
scale in the building of the mediaeval 
eathedrals and many of the more ancient 
houses of England and the Continent. 
Each century wrote itself down truly in 
stone, defects and bad taste as well as 
excellences. 



THE MODERN CITY. 97 

Anyone surveying well the old-fashioned 
homes of New England will arrive at an 
accurate estimate of the people who built 
them: sturdy narrowness, scorn of mere 
comfort for its own sake, a certain inde- 
finable dignity and scrupulous neatness. 
How subtilly too the present generation 
gives itself away! It keeps the good ex- 
ternals of old time, but within luxury has 
its way. The record is overwritten there 
on the rigid asceticism of the past. The 
house reveals the owner. 

In another way, dwelling places tell the 
story of the people. Gregariousness is a 
dominant note in modern life. People 
cannot entertain themselves ; they have no 
interior strength, no reserves to support 
them in solitude. The real estate tempter 
comes to the suburban resident, points out 
the impossibility of his old-fashioned 
house, paints the delights of a flat ; steam 
heat, electricity, etc. The theatres and 
shops will be so much nearer; there is 
always something going on. The subur- 
banite yields. Forgotten are the charms 
of independent life and a house of his own, 
air, sunlight and green grass. He moves 



J8 THE USES OP ADVERSIT3T. 

into the city to inhabit a caravansary, 
sandwiched between layers of alien hu- 
manity. The householder is no more; he 
is a human document properly filed and in- 
dexed. He is known by a number and 
summoned by a push-button. The flat 
tells his story too. 

What a fearful jumble is the modern 
city! Its sky line recalls a bad 
dream. Every form of architectural ugli- 
ness is there materialized. The buildings 
along a street are like the recruits in an 
awkward squad ; they toe the line and that 
is all. No troup of revolutionaries, garbed 
in odds and ends of military apparel is 
more ludicrous to the discerning eye than 
a typical street of an American city. In 
high relief are revealed the ignorance, the 
vagaries, the foolish ambition of archi- 
tect, builder and proprietor. Greek art 
portrayed the spirit of Greece. Roman 
art, imitative yet independently adaptive, 
mirrored the Roman character. In both 
there was a faithfulness to the laws of 
symmetry. But our modern cities are a 
hideous hodge-podge, without law, design 



THE MODERN CITY. 99 

or taste. Like Topsy, they have "jes' 
growed." 

It is a true portrait. It shows forth 
our slip-shod educational methods, our be- 
nighted contempt for the canons of the 
past, our corroding materialism, our un- 
accountable pride in costly ugliness. The 
human nautilus has gone to great trouble 
to make his shell an authentic record of 
all his deficiencies. 



IGNORANCE AND 
EDUCATION. 



y**s HIS is an age of shams. We eat 
V^ sham, food sold o us in ornamental 
cartons. We wear sham clothes that 
fall to pieces in a few months. The 
sick load their systems with sham medi- 
cines. We shout ourselves hoarse over 
sham statesmen and go into raptures over 
sham culture. Among many curious no- 
tions prevalent at the present day is that 
concerning the dividing line between ignor- 
ance and education. Broadly speaking, the 
criterion is the ability to read and write 
the vernacular. If you can spell through 
the newspapers and sign your name you 
are educated ; if you cannot you are a clod. 
I never pass our numerous and costly 
schoolhouses without wondering whether 
they are worth what they cost the com- 
munity. Every one has heard of Lord 
Macauley's prodigious schoolboy who was 
credited by the essayist with an amount 
of knowledge that would have been un- 



IGNORANCE AND EDUCATION. 101 

usual in a university professor. Are not 
these edifices erected with the vague ex- 
pectation of producing prodigies? I can- 
not rid myself of the dread that these 
great schoolhouses are temples of idolatry 
— the idolatry of false educational stan- 
dards. The pagans built costly structures 
in honor of gods who were mere personi- 
fications of the elements or the passions. 
The moderns build costly structures in 
honor of a deity they call education. 

Have you ever met a boy or girl in the 
grammar grades who could read intelli- 
gently or could write a fair letter ? I have 
listened to many youngsters recite and 
read ; they might as well have been mouth- 
ing Choctaw. Lucid composition seems to 
have become a Lost Art in the schools. Not 
long ago I received a letter from a young 
collegian. If all goes well, he will gradu- 
ate next year with the degree: Bachelor 
of Arts. His letter would be no credit to 
a child of ten, educated at home by a care- 
ful mother. 

We have lost our bearings in this mat- 
ter of education, mistaken the sham for 
the reality. Some of the wisest men and 



Lt2 THE USE* OF ADVERSITT. 

women I have ever known were unable to 
read or write. I suppose school children 
of the present day would look down on 
them in pity. I recall meeting a hulking 
boy of fourteen who was looking for a job. 
He had spent two years at a grammar 
school. Obesrving his broad shoulders, I 
hinted that laborers were needed in vari- 
ous places. "Awh," remarked he, "That's 
all right for the old man ; he can't read. 
I got an education." 

We all have our narrow lines of learn- 
ing, but outside of these we are ignorant. 
Higher mathematics, mechanics, electrical 
matters, medicine, the different depart- 
ments of business are an unknown country 
to all except those who have specialized 
in them. How many master a foreign 
language in school or college ? Yet porters 
in European hotels and Oriental drago- 
mans speak half a dozen languages with 
fluency and surprising correctness. If you 
wish to measure your own ignorance, talk 
with a farmer, a telephone repairer, a mo- 
torman, or the first man you encounter 
who has a special trade. 

In the generation that has passed were 



IGNORANCE AND EDUCATION. 101 

hundreds of men who could neither read 
nor write, yet carried on large enterprises 
successfully and figured more closely than 
the technical experts. They reached the 
solution of problems by methods of their 
own, but the solutions were correct. The 
architects of great American fortunes 
owed little to the schools. On the prin- 
ciple that men admire what they lack, 
many of these have given millions to the 
schools, but as a matter of fact, they won 
an education that no schools can give, and 
in their chosen lines they were experts. 
I have no intention of decrying edu- 
cation, but at the same time, I do not like 
to see schools erected into a fetish. This 
seems to be the tendency. It is taken for 
granted that if a boy or girl spends so 
many years at school he or she comes 
out educated. Yet if you happen to be 
thrown in with these young people you 
will be at a loss to find out what they 
have learned. They have swallowed a few 
facts, they have acquired a jargon, they 
are entirely convinced that they are edu- 
cated, but when they try to find situations 
there seems to be something lacking. 



104 THE USES OF ADVERSITT. 

What amazes me is the solid training, 
the mass of accurate knowledge possessed 
by men and women who are not regarded 
as educated at all in the popular sense of 
the word. Young people who have en- 
joyed all the advantages the schools can 
give are accorded a definite position or 
class status, while those who have had to 
fend for themselves, never dreaming 
that they possess any educational stand- 
ing, put them to shame when there is ques- 
tion of accuracy and efficiency. 

Do not make prigs of children by ex- 
hibiting them and their supposed talents. 
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a 
phonograph will do better work and is more 
enjoyable. Let them see and know people 
who are not considered educated. Let 
them find out how little mere book learning 
is worth when placed side by side with 
experience and close observation. The 
more I see of workmen, of those who earn 
money by producing real results, the more 
I feel schools to be over-rated institutions 
and myself an ignoramus. 



ACROBATS. 



y**; HE daily press is fast becoming a 
V-} series of chronicles devoted to the 
performances of lightning-change 
artists, to puffs of surprising intel- 
lectual side-shows and the mental pirou- 
ettes of smirking dancers. I feel that an 
apology is due the hard-working members 
of the theatrical profession for using this 
figure of speech to describe the vocal and 
printed antics of the so-called "leaders of 
thought." The stars of the stage and saw- 
dust ring labor strenuously and endanger 
their lives for small salaries. The theatre 
and circus demand the spangles, the rouge 
and the set smile. They are a part of the 
business. But for our sins and exactions 
we are afflicted with hordes of publicity- 
seekers who are ready to advocate, approve 
or argue anything from kleptomania to 
homicide for half a column of print. They 
are literary mercenaries. 

The Monday morning paper is of neces- 
sity dull, but one wonders what dearth of 



ICfi THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

news impels editors to give space to the 
pages of slush and blasphemy miscalled, 
"sermons." The worst characteristic of 
these diatribes is not their outrage against 
religion and decency, though this is flag- 
rant enough, but their self-evident insin- 
cerity. Any craze or ism is snatched up 
by these talkers with shark-like voracity. 
Nothing is too base or revolting, provided 
the speakers can catch the ears of the 
groundlings. 

The Eighteenth Century saw the rise of 
a new species of scribe, whose pen was at 
the service of anyone who would pay, and 
who dealt out abuse without stint at the 
will of his employers. But it must be said, 
in explanation if not exculpation, that most 
of these scurrilous writers wrote that they 
might eat. Their modern representatives 
have not even this small excuse; they 
write merely to be talked about. 

There is no crime so noisesome that 
they disdain to touch it; no disaster on 
which they refrain from hanging their 
anathemas. A recent disgusting murder 
trial furnished them with material for 
months. They could not even let the dead 



ACROBATS. 1#7 

of the "Titanic" rest under the waves of 
the North Atlantic. That awful scene 
which the moving-picture shows were for- 
bidden to exploit was sketched with all 
the horrors the pulpiteers could conjure 
up, to denounce someone or other. All 
for notoriety! 

Time was when journals had convictions. 
Advertising and money have eliminated 
these. We smiled at Charles A. Dana 
and his animosities. But they were honest 
animosities. He wrote what he thought, 
without fear or favor. But the modern 
editorial is as much a matter of commerce 
as a patent medicine advertisement. It is 
a wonder newspaper offices dare to pre- 
serve their files, so redolent are they of 
rank inconsistency. But the proprietors 
know their public. Yesterday and tomor- 
row count for nothing. To tickle the pub- 
lic palate for today is enough. 

The most melancholy of all literature is 
history — at least as it has been written in 
English these three centuries past — for the 
most popular histories reveal a degree of 
moral turpitude almost incalculable in the 
garbling of texts, the destruction of con- 



108 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

texts and twisting of plain statements. 
The men who wrote Church history, did so 
with their sources before them, and they 
deliberately mutilated what they found 
there to make out a case for prejudice. 

No wonder a roar of rage swept across 
England when Britons read what Lloyd 
George said of the Anglican Establish- 
ment. That rage was the natural explo- 
sion of a nation that had been systematic- 
ally lied to for three hundred years. 
Lloyd George is probably the most bitterly 
hated man in English public life by the 
adherents of Anglicanism because he tore 
off the plaster that covered a sore in 
the body politic of Great Britain. 

Does any honest man, irrespective of 
creed, believe for a moment the lies that 
are peddled by shameless sectaries about 
the Catholic Church ? Not one. Do these 
def amers themselves believe the filth they 
are circulating ? Not for an instant. It is 
merely their trade. There is a degenerate 
section of readers that craves this pabu- 
lum. It has had its prototypes in every 
century. 

When religious prejudice was a creed, 



ACROBATS. 109 



when party spirit was hot, it was only nat- 
ural that men were carried away by hate 
and obstinate dislike, and believed any- 
thing against an enemy. Today both are 
anachronisms. Yet for a paltry wage cer- 
tain writers pander to the appetites of 
the ignorant and unthinking. 

The posing and grimacing go on from 
day to day. Men write magazine articles 
and books for one side or the other, pre- 
cisely as a contractor builds a house with- 
out care about the use to which it will be 
put when finished. When a new paymas- 
ter appears they will write other articles 
and books that flatly contradict what they 
had written before. All this without re- 
gard to the truth defamed, the characters 
smirched or the evil done. 

The only line to take concerning all this 
trash is to pass it over in disgust. But 
honest people everywhere ought to be on 
their guard against hired and conscience- 
less scribblers. No matter how many de- 
grees they write after their names, or the 
wide advertising a sensational press gives 
them, or the blatant effrontery of their 
very pose, they are mercenaries and their 



110 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

word is worth no more than the promises 
printed on a cure-all, or the ante-election 
charges of a demagogue. 



OBLIGATIONS. 



© 



ETWEEN the two words promise 
and performance lies in great part 
the field of human action. Whether 
in an individual, corporate or na- 
tional way, men work on the principle that 
action is the fulfilment of a promise. 

The simplest transaction of life between 
man and man is an instance of this; the 
ordering of groceries, the writing of a 
check, the hiring of a house. There is a 
mutual promise with expectation of mu- 
tual performance. 

All the great works of public utility and 
corporation enterprise, the railroads, in- 
dustrial plants and other achievements 
performed by men banded together in a 
business way illustrate in all the ramifica- 
tions of their construction the working 
out of the self -same basic idea. 

Not only is there a contract in each case 
between the leading parties, but on each 
side there is a chain of contracts between 
the leaders and those selected to perform 



112 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

allotted duties for the completion of the 
work. One can scarcely realize at first the 
bewildering series of agreements, written, 
verbal or implied, which enables a company 
to construct a railroad or a sky-scraper. 
Once this work is done and the con- 
struction enters upon the function for 
which it was made, the working of the 
same principle goes on. The most humble 
individual who buys a railroad ticket en- 
ters upon a contract with the company 
and the ticket is his proof of it. In return 
for so much money the company agrees to 
transport him so many miles and guaran- 
tees him a certain measure of safety dur- 
ing the time of the journey. So the whole 
industrial world; the trains rattling over 
tracks, the looms whirring in the mills, the 
multitutes of workers hurrying hither and 
thither in the early morning with cease- 
less clicking of heels, are all playing varia- 
tions of the same theme ; promise and per- 
formance. 

Political affairs also conform to this 
principle. The candidate for office, be it 
great or small, first makes promises to his 
party. Once selected he makes promise to 



OBLIGATIONS. 113 



the electorate and in case he is chosen the 
fulfilment of these and other implied 
promises is before him. 

The great difficulty about the keeping 
of political promises, apart from the weak- 
ness of human nature, lies in the fact that 
one man makes promises to constituents 
numbered by thousands, all more or less 
differently minded and each with his own 
axe to grind. But all the same there is a 
line of consistency and performance which 
the elected man is pledged to observe. He 
may make enemies here and there, but 
his general duty is plain. 

The balance of power between magnates 
of the world, the eternal shifting and 
changing of political and trade relations, 
the constant disputes in all sorts of mat- 
ters are regulated by a series of promises 
between the different countries and which 
they are held to keep, or run the risk 
of war, or reprisal. 

Thus it is that the entire fabric of mod- 
ern life is knit together by mutual con- 
tracts, which however vague and indefin- 
able, have their stern reality and consti- 
tute real obligations. This stupendous 



114 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

mass of agreements is the result of na- 
tional growth and modern progress in ma- 
terial things. In primitive times trade was 
barter. The man with more of one kind 
of goods than he needed exchanged a part 
of these for other goods of which he stood 
in need. In the course of time money of 
some kind came to represent value, but as 
business increased and the transfer of pre- 
cious metals was inconvenient and unsafe, 
the practice came into vogue of employing 
written or printed promises guaranteeing 
the deposit of money with someone trusted 
by both parties. But as affairs increased 
and became more complex, it became neces- 
sary to employ in the transaction of busi- 
ness a great variety of signed and stamped 
papers, which by common consent came to 
stand for real values. Hence it is that 
the most important and far-reaching mat- 
ters of modern trade are facilitated with- 
out the passing of money at all, but rather 
by the execution of certain promises which 
both parties by law and for their own in- 
terests are obliged to fulfil. 

In the broader and higher sense life it- 
self is the performance of a promise. We 



OBLIGATIONS. Hi 

are ushered into this world to fulfil cer- 
tain duties which are clear and well de- 
fined, and good life whether in low or high 
station is simply the performance of these 
duties. Some of these contracts are in- 
herited and we grow gradually into the 
realization of them and the necessity of 
keeping them. No one can say, on coming 
to a knowledge of what health is, that he 
is not bound to preserve that health under 
ordinary circumstances by certain action 
and abstention. No one coming to a real- 
ization of what his Faith is can escape the 
logic by which certain duties follow from 
the acceptance of that Faith. But the ex- 
istence of these laws and duties, far from 
discouraging and bewildering people 
should rather strengthen them and ener- 
gize duty and action, for these laws show 
order, without which nothing can be done 
well. Were we to be transported from this 
world of law and order to some realm 
where all things happened by chance and 
everything was unreliable, we would soon 
realize the value of the present system of 
life, however imperfectly it may work out 
in individual cases. 



THE BETTERERS. 



^^lHERE is a vast number of people at 
U present busy in a frantic way try- 
HH] ing to better human conditions. 
They are divided into almost as 
many sects as Protestants. The majority 
of them are men and women who are well 
off financially and with more time on their 
hands than they know how to use. To 
give them due credit, their intentions are 
admirable, their activity incessant and 
their energy boundless. The main trouble 
with them is that their axioms are only 
assumptions, but they hold to these with 
all the fanatical zeal of a Mohammedan, 
and on these assumptions they base their 
work. 

To take a classic instance ; the Prohibi- 
tionists. Their basic doctrine is that al- 
cohol taken internally is a poison and 
therefore liquor drinking must cease. 
It makes no difference to them that ex- 
perts cannot agree upon the effect of al- 
cohol on the human system. The Prohi- 



THE BETTERERS. 117 

bitionists have made up their minds and 
that settles the matter. 

Then there are the Christian Scientists 
who calmly aver that there is no such 
thing as pain and will argue the matter out 
with a man who is screaming with gout 

Recently we have had a new accession to 
the ranks, the Emmanuel movement, 
whose reason for existence is that minis- 
ters know more about disease and its 
treatment than physicians. 

Lastly, we have the horde of social ama- 
teurs who discovered yesterday evils ex- 
istent and well-known almost from the 
foundation of the world and each one of 
these enthusiasts is filling the air or the 
magazines with brand new remedies for 
all social ills. 

There is one beautiful feature about 
these betterers; their enthusiasm, their 
unaffected and unbounded self-confidence. 
It demands a very high order of self -hyp- 
notism for one who knows nothing about 
bridge-building to walk into the office of 
an engineer and tell him that his plans are 
all wrong. The explanation of this phe- 
nomenon is that all this betterment craze 



11* TMB USES OF ADVERSITT. 

is founded not on knowledge but on feel- 
ing, and born of sympathy rather than 
study and experience. 

The Prohibitionist feels so intensely the 
evil of drunkenness that he attempts the 
impossible — to prevent all men from 
drinking liquor. The Christian Scientist 
pities suffering so much that he attempts 
an absurdity — to prove to the sufferer that 
there is no pain. The Emmanuel people 
are so eager to assuage the woes of man- 
kind that they start to treat them without 
waiting to study medicine. As for the so- 
cial enthusiasts, they know full well that 
the millenium is inside their own skulls 
and their only .dread is that death may 
come before they can tell mankind all 
about it. 

All these people think they have short 
cuts to the solution of world problems. 
They have no patience whatever with the 
knowledge and experience that men have 
painfully gathered during some thousands 
of years of living and dying. And most 
of them, to tell the truth, take man to be 
little more than an animal highly improved 
by long physical evolution. Finding that 



THE BETTEREM. Ill 

the question of the soul bothers them they 
ignore or deny its existence. This, of 
course, simplifies their work very much. 

In their one-sidedness, their illogic 
and pride these betterers are legitimate 
children of the Protestant revolt. They 
choose some form of misery, some unde- 
niable ill and think its eradication means 
everything, just as certain Protestants 
specialized on predestination and others on 
salvation through faith alone. They do 
not realize that pathology, whether spirit- 
ual, physical or moral, is a hard and in- 
volved problem. They are firmly convinced 
that if men could be brought to see things 
their way the millenium would dawn. 

They are also like Protestants in this, 
that they think that all men who lived 
before their time were either numbskulls 
or rogues and that the only ones in past 
centuries who are worth talking about are 
those who quarrelled with constituted au- 
thority. The teaching, the experience and 
work of mankind before Luther rebelled 
are simply worthless. In fact the main 
claim to importance that past ages can 
make is that the men and women of by- 



120 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

gone centuries by generation made it pos- 
sible for the betterers to be bom. The 
Christian virtue of Temperance is a foolish 
delusion. The soothing power of the Sac- 
raments is silly superstition. The benedic- 
tion of a priest is quackery. The work of 
Religious Orders among the poor was un- 
scientific. Prohibition, Christian Science, 
Emmanuel treatment and social dabbling 
are the key to everything! 

The average man as he gets older won- 
ders more and more how humanity, handi- 
capped as it has been, has accomplished so 
much; he is scared by the immensity of 
the universe and the sum of human en- 
deavor. He is content to do what he is 
told by the wisdom of ages and constituted 
authority, but the betterer is bothered by 
none of these thoughts. He knows that 
the Creation was a badly done job, that 
the only remarkable thing about mankind 
is its remarkable stupidity, and even his 
only fear has passed, for it was this ; what 
would have become of the world if the bet- 
terer had failed to be born to solve its 
problems out of his own head and to teach 
men how to live. 



TAKING PAINS. 



1/^vlENIUS has been defined as "an infi- 
nLA nite capacity for taking pains." 
nUMI But painstaking" is not genius any 
more than parturition is a child. 
It is not genius but life that consists in 
the infinite capacity for taking pains. 

To endure pain is passive and not ne- 
cessarily heroic, but to take pains is active 
and oftentimes demands a courage and 
persistence that amount to heroism. It 
shows vividly the course of one who vol- 
untarily undergoes discomfort and per- 
haps anguish in order to effect some re- 
sult which he considers worth the trouble. 
All real effort entails pain. The line of care- 
lessness, of least resistance generally ends 
in pain, but the end is unsought and terri- 
fying. He who takes pains, surveys the 
problem, counts the cost and calmly goes 
forward to the long and toilsome conflict, 
believing that he does no more than his 
duty. 

It is hardly realized to what extent our 



THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 



civilization depends upon this quality in 
men who gain small honor and little pay. 
If the workers ceased to take pains 
we would all speedily be in a parlous state, 
for it is just this extra effort, this painful 
care, this ceaseless vigilance that keep the 
wheels of the world revolving and spell 
progress. 

The magnate in his private car, the cap- 
italist in his sumptuous skyscraper office 
and the commutor who clings to a strap 
while steam or electricity hurl him miles 
across the country, all depend for life and 
limb upon the painstaking of men they 
have probably never seen and are not in- 
terested in at all. 

We are living an artificial life. The city 
dweller inhabits a world not so much of 
God as of man. He does his work not 
standing on the solid earth, but perched 
like a bird hundreds of feet in the air in 
a steel and stone cage. He goes about, 
not by means of the feet given to him by 
the Creator but by means of remarkable 
contrivances invented for the purpose of 
transporting men and merchandise swift- 
ly. He has gotten away from Nature and 



TAKING FAINS. lag 



lives in an environment of man-made 
things. Hence he must depend for his life 
and safety, not as formerly upon his own 
prudence and courage, but upon the care 
and skill of other men, strangers working 
for pay. If the average man sat down and 
considered the degree in which his conti- 
nued existence is dependent upon the 
watchfulness of others not directly con- 
cerned with him at all, he would expe- 
rience a species of nightmare. 

Life at best is an individual testing of a 
theory of probabilities, but as most of us 
live, it is the wildest kind of a wager. 
Roughly it is regulated by a scale com- 
puted like the average expectation of life 
of the insurance companies, but the indi- 
vidual is apt to forget how small he bulks 
in such a scale. 

There are frequent fires day and night 
in cities, yet we work in ten-story offices 
and sleep in fifteen-story hotels without a 
qualm. Daily the journals chronicle disas- 
ters on land and sea with deplorable loss 
of life, yet we buy railroad and steamship 
tickets and board electric cars with the un- 
conscious aplomb of a man who is on his 



124 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

way to be hanged and thinks he is going 
to supper. Every day we eat food of whose 
production and preparation we know 
hardly anything. It may be filled with 
death-dealing substances, yet we permit 
none of these considerations to interfere 
with our digestion. 

What, then, is the explanation of this 
curious confidence, this continual taking of 
risks of every kind without a thought of 
the possible consequences? A belief that 
other people are taking pains. We hold 
without adequate proof that the manufac- 
turer and the merchant saw to it that our 
food is fit to eat. If they did not we 
would be a poor insurance risk, for food 
easily becomes poison if carelessly pre- 
pared. 

We board the car in the morning sure of 
the motorman ; we take the elevator in se- 
rene confidence that it is well built and 
in good order and the operator reliable; 
we labor secure in the belief that the 
janitor in the basement sees to it that no 
anarchist enters to blow the whole struc- 
ture skyward. We visit a hotel in another 
city and take a twelfth floor room, acting 



TAKING PAINS. 125 



upon the assumption that others watch 
while we sleep in our aerial berths, that 
the firemen are waiting for the first alarm, 
that fire-escapes are in good order and 
that we may go to bed in peace. 

When we board the train next morning 
we do so on a wager with ourselves that 
track-walkers have inspected every foot of 
the miles of rail and every bridge, that 
the car wheels are tested, the engineer 
sober and in his right mind and the dis- 
patchers sure to give proper directions. If 
we did not firmly believe these things I do 
not see how any sane man would dare to 
board a train. 

The city goes about its business and 
pleasure, traffic whirls and beneath the 
surface of things are thousands of keen- 
eyed, steady-nerved men who see to it that 
all is safe. These are the men on whom 
the country depends for life, who are ex- 
pected to take pains ceaselessly for a small 
wage. I always feel like removing my hat 
in presence of engineers, firemen, builders 
and even elevator men, for who knows 
when one of these will hold my life in the 
hollow of his hand. It is well for us that 



12« THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

workingmen take pains. When, therefore, 
they ask higher wages or shorter hours, 
let us reflect that we are interested, for on 
their courage and conscientious work de- 
pend not merely the prosperity but the 
safety of us all. 




UNWORKED MINES. 



rpyl^OM time to time the world is 
[J^l startled by the news that a rich 
deposit of gold or silver has been 
discovered. It may be in the Cali- 
fornian hills, or on the Yukon beach, or in 
some lonely mountain of Mexico. No mat- 
ter how inaccessible and inhospitable the 
country or dangerous the journey, thou- 
sands are fired with the fever of the quest 
and flock to the new mines. The gold has 
reposed there for centuries. It was as 
valuable five centuries ago as it is today, 
but no man knew of its existence. 

There have been millions of dollars of 
value almost in plain sight of travellers 
for unnumbered years. Fields that were 
despised because they did not yield wheat 
or vegetables to their incurious owners 
have yielded fortunes to men of expe- 
rience. The tendency of men is to go in a 
rut, to esteem what others have approved. 
Babies played jackstraw with stones worth 
the ransom of an emperor. The value was 



128 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

there, but it was not perceived until the 
fortunate comer investigated. 

The richest mines have been discovered 
by accident. It was not scientific search 
or keen foresight that brought them to 
light, but oftentimes a stumble. It is piti- 
ful to think that thousands in sore 
need, thousands whom a fraction of the 
wealth beneath their feet would have made 
prosperous for a lifetime, have gone 
on unheeding over undiscovered mines; 
to think of the melancholy fate of lone 
prospectors and hardy pioneers who have 
starved on the ground which held riches 
that might have brought them plenty. 
They worked and travelled and looked in 
vain, while fortune laughed at them. 

Daily men are coming to the front, ex- 
hibiting qualities of leadership and skill 
given to few. Every great war finds its 
wonderful strategists who in peace would 
have remained plain, unhonored citizens. 
Every crisis brings out heroes who knew 
not their own heroism. No one minded 
these men until the chance occasion 
showed them for what they were. 

The Elegy in a Country Churchyard is 



UNWORKED MINES. 12$ 

the saddest of poems for it sings of rare 
abilities esteemed as nothing 1 , but every 
country churchyard holds the same sad 
story. There rest the bones of men and 
women whose characters and minds would 
have bequeathed rich legacies of thought 
to mankind had fortune been kinder. They 
lived and died unheeding and unheeded 
■precisely as the gold lurking in the moun- 
tain crevices and the diamonds thrown in- 
to the corner of a hut. 

Men imitate one another. They troop 
along a path like sheep. They will 
make a Saul their leader because he is 
taller than his brethren. David has ever 
to prove his worth against Goliath. Many 
a boy who in mature years has glorified 
his age, fought hard to be a ploughboy 
and strove against his destiny. The peo- 
ple of remote villages from which geniuses 
have come laughed at those geniuses for 
decades and ranked them with the village 
fool. It was the man who could do a good 
day's work with the shovel who appealed 
to them. Years pass, fame comes to the 
village boy, thousands are enthralled by 
his eloquence, by the witchery of his style, 



130 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

by his skill with brush or chisel, and after 
his death someone erects a hideous monu- 
ment to him in his native town. As well 
might men have built monuments in the 
Black Hills or erected cairns on the sands 
of the Yukon. The talent was taken away 
from the place where it was not esteemed 
to bless humankind. 

Nature does not tire. She has not shown 
all her treasures. The mountains still teem 
with gold, there are millions lying around 
us to be discovered in the future by 
sons of fortune. Talent is about us on 
every side. Men whose names will be trum- 
peted down the corridors of time pass us 
every week. We know their names and 
think we are perfectly familiar with them. 
Time will give us the lie some day. 

If then the earth is filled with unworked 
mines ; if our neighbors have hidden pow- 
ers that later on will win fame, why may 
we not suspect ourselves? Are we not 
strangers to our own gifts even as we are 
to those of people around us ? Mayhap we 
need to know ourselves, to see if we are 
not wasting our time and neglecting capa- 
bilities of moment. Time and again men 



UNWORKED MINES. 131 

have gone on for years in some humdrum 
occupation until chance revealed what 
their life work was to be. Emerson, who 
wrote much nonsense and some sentences 
of rare beauty, said that no man knows 
what he can do until he has tried. Few 
fail to possess certain distinct gifts which 
they value little and seldom use. It 
would certainly be a grim joke for us if we 
carried to the grave powers that can ac- 
complish great things and wasted our time 
in pottering over inanities. It would be 
like the prospector who starves to death 
on a ledge of solid gold. 

The genius is an eccentricity; it is the 
persistent dullard who wins. The mounte- 
bank, the smooth talker, the seller of nos- 
trums grow rich and famous, while merit 
starves unnoticed. It would be bad enough 
if it were conscious but neglected merit, 
but it is worse, for it is unconscious. "What 
fools we mortals be!" In your character, 
in your crevice of the world, a neglected 
mine may exist. Make a mental in- 
ventory. You may have overlooked the 
most valuable thing. 



ATROCIOUS ENGLISH. 



X"]N THE small hamlets of the land, as 
well as in the great cities, large 
sums of money and an almost in- 
credible amount of care and thought 
are being devoted to the free education 
of the young. Journey where you will, 
academies and advanced schools meet the 
eye. They are maintained through the 
generosity of individuals and the large fees 
paid by parents to give children a mental 
training beyond the ordinary. Hundreds 
of colleges and universities are extending 
tfteir domains and manifesting all the 
signs of an enlightened competition in edu- 
cation. While I have no statistics to back 
up my statement, I am entirely certain 
that the cause of education costs the people 
of this country, directly or indirectly, more 
than the railroads or other great indus- 
trial enterprises. At all events, the Amer- 
ican people have invested vast sums of 
money in the business of instructing and 
educating youth. Can we honestly say 



ATROCIOUS ENGLISH. 133 

that at the present time the investment is 
a paying one? 

I have read many violent arraignments 
of the public school by its friends as well 
as its enemies. Some of them have laid 
stress on the inefficiency of the system in 
preparing boys and girls for their work 
in the world. Others have emphasized the 
point that after a course of nine years 
young people cannot read, write or cipher 
satisfactorily for ordinary requirements. 
With these matters at the moment I have 
nothing to do. But there is one matter 
which must be plain to reflecting men and 
women, and this is, that our young people 
speak their language atrociously. That 
this, in many cases, is an affectation of 
youth and not the result of ignorance is not 
the point. I think the majority of observ- 
ers will bear me out in saying that chil- 
dren of school age, whether in lower grades 
or in the colleges, use the worst variety 
of English that can be sampled among 
our population. If you doubt this, listen 
tc a bevy of high school girls as long as 
you can stand it, or a group of boys from 
one of our noted institutions. You will 



134 THE USES OP ADVERSITF. 

find that they use an unintelligible dialect. 
In fact, correct English seems to be taboo. 

This is not merely youthful extrava- 
gance. Go among those who have enjoyed 
all the advantages of modern school train- 
ing and are occupying prominent places in 
our social life. You will find that they 
carry with them the dialect of school days 
and employ it constantly. I am aware that 
a certain extreme section of English so- 
ciety has developed an appalling lingo of 
baby-talk. The speech of our people 
who are supposed to represent a high aver- 
age of mind betrays a manner of speak- 
ing that has no warrant in reason. 

This habitual slovenliness in speaking 
has become such a marked characteristic 
in our life that one is almost shocked to 
listen to a man or woman of the old school 
who talks without slang, clipped syllables 
or an affected drawl. I have paid some 
attention to this matter, and strange to 
say, I have heard the best and most cor- 
rect English, not from those who call them- 
selves educated, but from those who have 
had only the narrowest sort of technical 
training in schools. I find that the carpen- 



ATROCIOUS ENGLISH. Ill 

ter, the plumber and the grocer give a bet- 
ter example of the vernacular than the 
college man or society woman. I have 
noticed a cultivation of tone and language 
among country people that can be matched 
only by that of the people of Dublin. 

In all this I am far from saying that 
people cannot speak good English if they 
50 desire. They do not so desire. This is 
the failure of our school system. It does 
not instil proper methods of speaking into 
children. It does not inculcate that rever- 
ence for our common tongue, that respect 
for its integrity which certainly are among 
the main objects of true education and in- 
struction. It is not impressed upon the 
boys and girls of our schools that careful 
use of words and a pleasing intonation are 
not merely for special occasions, but indis- 
pensable for those who would claim the 
title ; lady or gentleman. 

Apart from some errors of pronunciation 
and picturesque use of certain words, the 
laboring man speaks better and purer Eng- 
lish than the professional man. The 
reason for this is that the first has not 
been spoiled. The second has an idea that 



186 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

proper speaking is something to be avoided, 
like priggishness. 

To one who has seen men and cities, 
the fact is painfully evident that the 
American people lack a certain respect for 
the language they speak. You will travel 
far in the older lands before experiencing 
a counterpart of this evil national habit. 
The Oriental, no matter what his station, 
is a model of correctness in speech. The 
European, while less flowery, sets careful 
limits to taking liberties with his language. 
He sees no reason for degrading or distort- 
ing it. It has been left for us to give a 
horrible example in this regard. I hold 
no brief just now for or against the public 
school, but I do contend that the public 
school fails to turn out scholars who speak 
English even passably well. Much of this 
is due, no doubt, to national flippancy and 
a tendency to haste in expressing ideas, 
as all else in our life. But it is surely 
a strange pass that young people on 
whose education so much money has been 
spent, speak far less grammatically than 
the men and women who have cost our 
school system little if anything at all. If 



ATROCIOUS HlfQLIBH. 137 

thirteen or fifteen years spent at books 
will not suffice to turn out men and women 
who have the taste and discrimination to 
use the vernacular decently, is it not time 
for a real investigation? 




BLATHER. 



CALLEYRAND stated that language 
was designed to conceal thought, 
and one never realizes the pro- 
found truth of this observation un- 
til circumstances have chained him to a 
pillar while chattering crowds sweep by, 
or converted him into a human sandwich 
in a packed trolley car with conversation 
furnished free by passengers. 

After the first violent nausea passes, the 
impression that breaks on the lis- 
tener is the enormous amount of perfectly 
good talk that is wasted. Ordinarily, 
when there is a group of two or three, es- 
pecially of the devout sex, each remark is 
delivered in triplicate. Next comes the 
number of words that have no bearing 
whatever on the topic in hand. 

People who are afflicted with excess dig- 
nity prefix a variety of semi-articulate 
sounds to their sentences ; others are poor 
starters and turn themselves back for a 
second and sometimes third trial; others 



BLATHER. 11$ 



still amble along somewhat after the fash- 
ion of a distanced horse in a race, talking 
diligently without anyone on earth being 
concerned in the least as to the matter or 
manner of the thought or words produced. 

There is still another variety, happily 
not common, the conversational tyrant 
who brooks no rivals or interruptions, and 
when he notices any party eager to enter 
the lists, pulls some mental lever with a 
conversational smashup as the result. 

Most people have on occasion been told 
that they talk too much. It is too bad 
that this great truth is not impressed on 
the public more often and emphatically, 
and that there is no sanction attached to 
it. Probably the only way to enforce any 
such rule would be to charge so much a 
word, as the telegraph companies do, or 
better, like the telephone people, a fixed 
tariff for the first three minutes, with an 
increase per minute after that. It is the 
only way to convince people of the amount 
of talk they waste. 

They who think clearly and speak lu- 
cidly and briefly are so rare that some 
decoration, like the Legion of Honor, 



140 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

should be conferred upon them, also a pen- 
sion. The average man or woman who 
goes to a store or office or bank to speak 
on anything out of the routine generally 
conceals thought most successfully — and 
yet people wonder why clerks appear 
weary of life. It is not of life but of talk, 
undigested, amorphous thought, that is 
poured out over them all day long and 
every day in the week. 

Some hold to Carlyle's extreme state- 
ment and maintain that the people 
are "mostly fools. " You will easily ascer- 
tain that this is a fallacy by the simple 
experiment of doing business with them. 
The trouble is in the expression of thought. 

Some people are so constituted that talk 
comes forth from them, as it were, drop 
by drop; others wish to heave a subject 
and its trimmings into your ears, as a 
drayman heaves a brimming basket, while 
a third variety comport their conversa- 
tion after the melancholy fashion familiar 
to all who have tried to pour liquid from a 
bottle after the cork has been driven 
through into the bottle ; their conversation 
is punctuated by gulps and gurgles. 



BLATHER. 141 

The writer who said of an acquaintance 
that his conversation was illumined by 
brilliant flashes of silence uttered a com- 
pliment. The impression to be gathered 
in crowds is that a surprising number of 
people have made a vow against silence — 
and keep the vow. There is really no harm 
in thinking about what you are to say 
before you attempt to clothe thoughts in 
words. 

In the first place, there is something in- 
delicate, indecorously "intime" in expos- 
ing naked mental processes to the world. 
It reminds one of that peculiar man, in the 
front of the old almanacs, surrounded by 
the signs of the zodiac. 

Again, it is a charitable thing to allow 
pauses for thought during conversation, 
for it may be that others desire to say 
something. 

Certain statisticians tell us the number 
of words in Shakespeare's vocabulary, and 
I believe, it is estimated that the average 
individual uses not more than three hun- 
dred, but these emphatically are used. If 
these three hundred words wore out like 
children's shoes, half of them would be in 



142 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

the shop to be heeled and half -soled most 
of the time, while the owners struggled 
along on interjections. 

There is something positively madden- 
ing about the constant repetition of a cer- 
tain word or expression. What countless 
thousands of young women who are little 
more than "sez I" and "sez he" factories, 
have escaped violent ends simply because 
murder, even among us, is occasionally 
punished. Every suffering listener can 
easily compile his little Purgatorial list. 

But, after all the worst conversational 
plagues are talkers who can enunciate 
words for hours without a single thought 
to be sifted from the turgid stream ; they 
go on forever; they are conversational in- 
ebriates who should be restrained by law 
and the parties furnishing them with 
topics should be prosecuted. Almost 
everything is taught in the schools now. It 
is a pity some expert does not open a 
school to teach people how to keep still. 




APPEARANCES. 



I CERTAIN society woman recently 
argued in favor of "dignified gam- 
^Tj bling." It was her contention that 
persons of wealth and social posi- 
tion should have gaming rights denied to 
ordinary folk. Her plea in effect was that 
great wealth is above law. 

There is no doubt that rich men and 
women assume regal airs, counting regula- 
tions as an impertinence. It is difficult to 
find any justification except caprice for 
such an attitude. An action is either right 
or wrong and money cannot change the 
ethics of the situation. But it always 
makes the attempt. As "society" is 
largely an effort to keep all except a fa- 
vored few out of an exclusive circle, so 
wealth essays to make law a rule only for 
"common people/' 

The feudal noble claimed the privilege 
of breaking all laws, divine and human, on 
the principle that God would think twice 
before condemning a nobleman to eternal 



144 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

punishment. This is insanity, but it is an 
enduring taint showing itself century after 
century. It is seen to evince itself among 
those whom overmuch money or power 
has blinded to the existence of unchang- 
ing standards of right and wrong. 

In past ages this claim of aristocrats 
that they were above the law obtained a 
foothold from the fact that a powerful 
nobleman could tyrannize ecclesiastical au- 
thority and induct parasites into chaplain- 
cies and even bishoprics. Lay investiture 
was an enemy that long gave trouble to 
the Church, and if the Church failed Cod 
alone stood for the right. 

In modern times the same claim suc- 
ceeds even better, because the offenders 
have divested themselves of belief in the 
supernatural, conscientious standards and 
respect for any higher law. 

The Sacrament of Penance is a great so- 
cial leveller. It hews to the line. The sin- 
ner undergoes two examinations: first of 
his own conscience and second by the con- 
fessor. When there is no balancing of soul 
accounts, the individual runs adrift and is 
guided only by appetite and fear of pub- 



APPEARANCES. 145 

lie shame. In process of time this ini- 
quitous rule of conduct has been erected 
into a sort of fetish. The one thing to 
which wealthy outlaws cleave is respect- 
ability. 

Now this respectability is merely titu- 
lar, a fiction of social law. It has nothing 
to do with probity, but is an arbitrary 
limit set to social actions. A man may 
keep up two establishments, provided 
there is no public outcry. He may be in- 
toxicated nearly all the time if he does not 
make a "scene." A "scene" is the unpar- 
donable crime. 

Thus it is that all solid standards are set 
at naught and in their place is built a 
flimsy stockade to hide unpleasant reali- 
ties. People may become accustomed to 
anything, no matter how absurd, and con- 
vince themselves that it is a proper code of 
conduct. This is evidently the case of the 
woman who argues for "dignified gam- 
bling." 

The same thing is characteristic of many 
so-called "reformers." It is not sin or evil 
life that offends them and which thoy 



14C THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

strive to remove, but the vulgarity of sin 
that is publicly offensive. 

They do not rebuke drunkenness among 
their social intimates or immorality among 
their acquaintances, but drunkenness 
that is a nuisance and immorality that 
flaunts itself publicly. They are victims 
of a mental twist that causes them to 
mistake grossness as the determining fac- 
tor in sin. 

The Spartans used the drunken slave as 
a horrid example to their children. The 
modern "submerged tenth" cite the drunk- 
enness and immorality of the rich as a jus- 
tification for their own delinquencies. 

It is no palliation of the deeds of a male- 
factor, that he is rich or socially promi- 
nent. It is an aggravation of his offense, 
but in every community there prevails a 
curious conspiracy against justice, and 
the basis of this conspiracy is the assump- 
tion that rich men can do no wrong. 

The radical evil of modern life is iden- 
tical with that which destroyed the em- 
pire of the Caesars and the rule of the 
French kings, namely, the substitution of 
"appearances" for the rock-ribbed princi- 



APPEARANCES. 147 



pies of right and duty. In the beginning 
the evil was confined to the ruling class, 
but it quickly ate its way like a cancer 
down to the vitals of the government and 
left the country an easy prey to attack or 
revolution. 

"The divinity that doth hedge a king" 
is but a legend of the past and the self -con- 
stituted aristocrat lives in a house of 
cards. A breath of revolution will scatter 
it and its occupants to the winds. The 
"unchurched" masses are as godless as the 
classes and give no hostage to appearances 
or respectability. The millionaire of today 
holds his wealth by an insecure tenure, for 
socialism and anarchy are rampant. 

It is therefore most injudicious on the 
part of wealthy people to claim any ex- 
emption from the laws established for the 
well-being and order of the community, for 
the wealthy idle on the slopes of a social 
volcano. The feminine gambler ingenu- 
ously voiced a sentiment unduly prevalent 
among her class, but generally covert. 

Any close student of modern times and 
conditions must reach one of two conclu- 
sions. Either the spreading irreligion 



148 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

must be checked by a return to conscien- 
tious standards braced up by living faith 
in God, or it will certainly end by destroy- 
ing utterly the existing social fabric and 
open the gates to an anarchy the conse- 
quences of which no man can foresee. 




THE AUTUMNAL DIRGE. 



n 



E who is untouched by the melan- 
choly of the Autumn winds is 
either a pachyderm or an arrant 
optimist. He must be either rooted 
and grounded in gladness or be destitute of 
feeling. No matter how merry the com- 
pany or loud the gaiety, the lull comes 
when the ear is assailed by the mournful 
wail of the wind. Like the Greek chorus, 
it breaks in on the drama, singing vaguely 
of woe. 

But it is when one is alone that the po- 
tency of the wind-spirits becomes a force 
almost personal. It is a ceaseless knock- 
ing at the gates of attention, like the cry- 
ing of a child in the night or the whining 
of an injured animal at the door. It plays 
upon the naked nerves. We suddenly real- 
ize the meaning of the old pagan cry: 
"Great Pan is dead." The glory of the 
Summer is departed, the flowers are with- 
ered, the grain is laid away. The skeleton 
trees keep watch over the waste, and Na- 



1M TH1 USEI OF APTERglTr. 

ture makes moan over the destruction of 
all she watched and tended. The earth is 
a vast necropolis, and the sky is oppressed 
with gloom. 

But the dominant quality of this tragic 
music is its insistence. You cannot escape 
it. The air is stirred to voices and repeats 
ceaselessly: "Alas! Alas." It is a plaint 
like that of Rachel mourning over her 
children and refusing to be comforted. The 
sounds rise and fall, are now loud, now 
soft, but the sad theme of the wind chorus 
never changes. 

Autumn is an eerie season. Winter 
makes the land a desert and is satisfied. 
The rapture of Spring brings no forebod- 
ings. Summer sunk in repletion has no 
space for introspection, but Autumn is 
filled with mystery and presage of ill. Its 
myriad voices sing in a minor key, bodying 
forth the two last great conscious realities 
of life, regret and dread. It is not merely 
the dirge of the dead Summer the Autumn 
winds sing. We know they rehearse our 
own Requiem. 

There is a terrifying multiple person- 
ality about those winds. It is as if lost 



THE AUTUMNAL DIRGE. 151 

souls wandering over the scenes of wasted 
lives bemoaned neglected opportunities 
and the contemned virtue that brings ulti- 
mate joy. You cannot see them, or inter- 
rogate them. You can only surmise their 
grief. Around the windows they flit and 
beat their hands and wail. The cadence 
has not one note of gladness, but is filled 
with death and lamentation. You can 
translate it into words and ever they shape 
themselves into the same strain: "Alas! 
Alas! 

Small wonder that the nations of North- 
ern Europe, nurtured under the spell of 
such winds as these evolved their weird 
mythology. They listened all their lives to 
that sad, spectral music. It was woven 
into the fibre of their being, this instinc- 
tive realization of mysterious voices, of 
vague unutterable grief. They looked forth 
at the visible world and Nature justified 
their inward vision and lent a touch of 
reality to a scheme of things wherein right 
failed just as its triumph was due, joy was 
struck down in the heyday of youth, and 
the wind spirits chanted mournful music 
over the graves of shattered hopes. 



152 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

Here, too, we see the origin of the 
Banshee. Figure to yourself the lonely 
cabin on the moor or the bleak mountain, 
the mother with her children about her 
knee, and beyond in the room the dead 
father. The night wind sweeps by with 
a shriek and she clasps the little ones 
tightly, for it is the Banshee! A crowd 
gathered about the fire in some great cas- 
tle hears in the momentary silence the 
shrill cry of the wind. Yes, there will be a 
death soon, for the Banshee is abroad ! 

It is the preparedness of the mind for 
the mysterious, the expectancy of the un- 
earthly, that give the Autumn wind its 
melancholy power. The whole world seems 
to be awaiting something in awe. An inde- 
finable feeling grips the heart. The being 
is swept by a nameless dread. A cold fear 
lays its finger upon the soul. Then man 
becomes Nature's Aeolian harp, and on his 
heart strings she plays her minor sympho- 
nies. Once the ear is attuned to that mys- 
tic music anything may happen. The ac- 
tual world recedes. The spirits take the 
stage. Out of this mental condition come 
the ghost stories, the marvelous folk-lore, 



THB AUTUMNAL, DIRGE. U3 

the tales of unaccountable disappearances. 
It is the very brooding ground of wraiths, 
and the wind provides fit accompaniment 
for the uncanny necromancy. 

We live on the borderland of the myste- 
rious. There is a faculty within us that 
makes that mysterious more real than the 
things which we touch and see, and never 
more so than in the gloomy stage setting 
of the November night, when the earth- 
noises are stilled and the wind-spirits hold 
court in the far reaches of the upper air. 
Before the eyes of fancy, spectral shapes 
swing and reel, multitudes of shades bow 
their heads and moan. The legion of the 
lost ones returns to earth to expiate in 
sigh and lament the sins of wasted years. 
The listener, held rigid by that compel- 
ling choral undertone of the solemn wind, 
galvanizes his past years. They troop by, 
each with averted visage. It is the mas- 
que of life endowed with vocal power. All 
the sadness of life is compressed within 
that span. Outside the wind keeps up its 
interminable plaint, and within him the 
quivering heart-strings repeat the mourn- 
ful song: "Oh for the sweetness of the 



154 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

youth that is gone, the feeling of unwear- 
ied strength, the uplifting of unscarred 
hope, the vanished glory of life's Spring- 
time." And the wind chorus repeats its 
moan. Alas ! Alas ! 




THE SEEKERS. 



H~"]E AVING aside the great body of men 
and women who find the concrete 
^ggfej problem of earning a living quite 
sufficient to engage their attention 
and energies, and considering the minority 
who, by position and advantages, are en- 
abled to take an active interest in hu- 
manity as a whole and to exert a predomi- 
nant influence on the times in which 
they live, we discern two camps set over 
against one another. The watchword of 
one is: look for the fine things in 
life, that of the other is: look for what 
is despicable. Both these camps are filled 
with people of great earnestness and abil- 
ity, but their energies in each case are 
bent in opposite directions. 

Life is so compacted of good and bad 
hopelessly mingled, it is so vast in its reach 
and even the keenest human mind is so 
inadequate an instrument for a true sur- 
vey, that the question resolves itself into 
this: What are you seeking? 

You will always find in mankind what 



156 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

you seek. If you are buoyed up by faith 
and charity, life will show itself to 
you in a benign aspect, every ill will have 
its attendant compensation. If you have 
no faith and think that humanity is ut- 
terly depraved and selfish, you will come 
on only too many evidences to support 
your theory. 

How few of all the publicists who put 
forth their views in print are animated by 
the spirit of fairness ! The great majority 
start out with an inherited or pre-con- 
ceived theory and hunt for facts to bear 
it out. Whether it be a question of reli- 
gion, sociology or politics, men tend to be 
partisans rather than honest students. 

For more than three hundred years his- 
tory as written in the English language 
has been a conspiracy against the truth. 
The shibboleth was: No good can come 
out of the Catholic Church. So they set 
to work to travesty and vilify it. Any- 
thing in its favor was tabooed, nothing 
against it was too vile to magnify. They 
sought, not truth, but the despicable 
phases of history, and in the great muck- 
heap thrown out by seventeen centuries 



THE SEEKERS. 157 



they found plenty to bolster up their ma- 
lign theory. 

The main trend of modern humanita- 
rianism is to consider man, not as a crea- 
ture of soul and body, but as a higher 
order of animal. It endeavors to improve 
the baser part of man, the body. It 
started out by eliminating the soul and 
then attempted to formulate life standards 
that would be workable. Man is an animal, 
though this is but part of the story, but 
if you take it as the axiom you can always 
find instances to prove it. 

The basic principle of very many who 
are working for the purification of poli- 
tics and for good government seems to be 
that the people are unfit to govern them- 
selves, that if left alone they will choose 
unworthy representatives, and therefore 
the only thing to do is so to restrict and 
bend suffrage that power shall rest in the 
hands of a few whose theories of govern- 
ment must prevail. 

Here again there is no honest study of 
conditions on the basis of equal citizen- 
ship, but an abiding distrust of democracy. 

There is a consistent error in these 



158 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

three great departments of human acti- 
vity, and though all ages have seen its 
workings, the present age beholds its fine 
flower and fruition. The error is that re- 
spectability is a substitute for religion. 
Working on that theory a powerful class 
has attempted to control society. 

What was the basic idea of that Puritan 
religious system, which under one guise or 
another, has been the opponent of the 
Church for three centuries? External 
dignity of a particularly repellant sort. 
The church must give way to the bare 
meeting house, the natural enthusiasm of 
religion must be changed to a cold formal- 
ism, the spontaneous gaiety of life must be 
swathed in iron bands! 

What is the main intent of professional 
social workers ? To make the poor respect- 
able. Teach them to care for their bodies, 
for, forsooth! they have no souls to care 
for. Put the young in schools where their 
minds may be sharpened, for only thus can 
they survive in the race of life. The self- 
respect that comes of education is to shape 
their moral conduct. These people usurp 
the place of God in society. They attempt 



THE SEEKERS. 159 



to exile Him, to make humanity over to 
fit their gloomy theories of life. 

What is the main aim of the political 
reformer? To obtain a government of 
"respectables." Hound the petty grafter, 
exterminate the ward politician, not be- 
cause they are criminal, but because they 
are vulgar. Manage government by means 
of a well-mannered oligarchy. Financiers 
who steal millions respect the social amen- 
ities and must be immune. The gigantic 
violations of law that double the price of 
the necessaries of life can await the puri- 
fication of politics! 

Such performances do not excite horror 
because their authors are prominent in the 
nation and of great wealth. But the basic 
error is that immense peculations cannot 
be bad because the authors are respect- 
able. 

Does this give pause to those whose in- 
fluence is paramount in the land ? Not at 
all. They have made up their minds, they 
have formulated their theories and facts 
must square with them. There are two 
words that describe them and their proce- 
dure perfectly : "Whited Sepulchres." 



POPULAR TASTE. 



X-jT was said not long ago that the re- 
marks of prize-fighters are more 
read than the speeches of the 
greatest statesmen. Why not? 
The reading public has more in common 
with the pugilist than with the statesman. 
The man of high thought is always sure 
of a small audience, but he must be content 
that it is small. Few have the intelligence 
and taste to enjoy the best speaking and 
thinking, while millions are interested in 
the words of a man who has fought his 
way to eminence with no more protection 
to his hands than two-ounce gloves. A 
very few enjoy both and their exploits, 
the catholics of the intellectual world. 

Most people want their pabulum pre- 
digested. As it is with breakfast foods 
so with reading. They do not want to 
take trouble. They want some one to do 
the thinking and give them the results in 
language easy to grasp. The public wants 



POPULAR TASTE. 161 

its political news, that is, news about im- 
portant state matters and without any sen. 
sational qualities, in the smallest possible 
compass and in the fewest possible words. 
This is the secret of the "Yellow Press" 
and the sensational editorial. They take 
the responsibility of thinking from the 
reader and interest without tiring him. 

But to go back to the original conten- 
tion; who will allege that the remarks of 
any eminent senator can vie in interest 
for the people with the remarks of an 
eminent pugilist? The senator speaks to 
a select and scholarly coterie of men who 
wrestle with the intricate problems of 
tariff, currency and military matters, all 
about as attractive to an ordinary man as 
a table of logarithms. But the pugilist 
speaks to the whole country as the 
crowned king of fisticuffs, a game which 
every boy has played with varying skill 
and success in earlier days. It is pretty 
well admitted that no one thoroughly un- 
derstands the currency question, but 
everyone understands fighting, and more 
enjoy it than are willing to confess it. 

The land is covered with schools and 



162 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

people are very much in earnest about 
education, but it seems to be a fact that 
the great majority of men and women, 
after having left school revert intellectu- 
ally to a savage state, something after the 
manner of the educated Indian returning 
to the tepee. They reach their intellectual 
level. The school often puts on the mind a 
coating of culture that does not "strike in" 
and which peels off in the shock and scram- 
ble of life as weather removes poor paint 
from a building. I believe that a much 
larger number of people than is generally 
supposed are impervious to education as 
ordinarily understood, at least they throw 
it aside on entering actual life as the col- 
lege graduate puts off his cap and gown. 
Here is a vast public, the sham-edu- 
cated and the frankly and joyously igno- 
rant to whom the easy writer appeals irre- 
sistibly. If he is a newspaper man 
he colors up the happenings of the day, 
the comedies and tragedies of actual pres- 
ent human life. If he is a novelist he in- 
vents situations and weaves a plot to 
hold the reader enthralled. Always the 
method is the same. The reader is inter- 



POPULAR TASTE. 163 

ested without having to think too hard. 

There is another point. Those whose 
lives are quiet and humdrum, who have no 
adventures in life seek adventures in 
books, and this on the whole is a very 
prudent and safe way of having adven- 
tures. Moreover, a man sees romance and 
adventure in every line of life except his 
own, which to him is sordid fact. Detec- 
tive stories appeal to everybody except the 
detective. Political stories bore the politi- 
cian. It is only the working out of the 
old fallacy. The other side of the road 
always looks smoother to the traveler. As 
the great majority of people lead narrow 
and simple lives their ideals of happiness 
and advenjture are correspondingly com- 
monplace. 

The literary taste of the average reader 
is execrably bad. He all but creates badly 
written books by the demand he voices 
for such reading matter. He does 
not appreciate and will not buy well 
thought out and well written books. What 
he wants is trash. And so the people who 
are literary purveyors or panders, wheth- 
er in the newspapers, the magazines, or 



164 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 

publishing offices, furnish the reading 
public with what it seeks — f or a consider- 
ation — and everybody is satisfied. 

There is much talk about the blessings 
of modern education in comparison with 
the widespread ignorance of times gone by, 
yet the universal schooling which has been 
spread out so thin over the land has re- 
sulted in a debasement of literary taste 
which would be incomprehensible to the 
thinking man of a century ago. 




DEMAGOGUES. 



p^jHERE is something pathetic about 
^J a political campaign. The excite- 
ment, the gatherings of delegates, 
the heated oratory, are merely 
surface manifestations. It is all theatrical. 
As at a play, one instinctively thinks, not 
of the pageant and the lines spoken by the 
actors, but of the real agents behind the 
scenes, for whose benefit the public pays 
and applauds. No man can be either so 
good or so bad as a political candidate is 
pictured by supporters or opponents. 

The real hero of the convention and the 
election is not the man whose name is on 
every lip or the skilful manager who suc- 
ceeds in placing his chief in the coveted 
position, but that great moral person, the 
people, in whose name all are acting, yet 
who seems to gain little, whatever the 
issue of the conflict. 

Each time the chosen men of various 
parties assemble in some city to settle 
nominations, they gather to give that 



166 THE USES OF ADVERSITT. 

blind and manacled Samson, the "plain 
people," an opportunity to burst his 
shackles and assume control. The pathos 
lies in the fact that the shackles are not 
burst. There is a terrific struggle. The 
friends of Samson plead his cause and 
cheer their cohorts, but when all is over, 
Samson is still in his gyves. 

A presidential year is a momentous 
epoch for every workingman in the land. 
If he could voice his woes in the conven- 
tion, there would be a long step forward, 
but the trouble is, the ordinary man fails 
to understand the issues. There are so 
many self-styled representatives clamor- 
ing to be lifted to the place of leader, that 
the plain citizen is bewildered. He suffers 
from a plethora of champions, each claim- 
ing to be the real one. 

It is often stated that there is a lack 
of issues; that there are now no great 
questions, like slavery, to arouse the mass 
of citizens. There is the usual patter about 
the tariff, "interests" and the cost of liv- 
ing. Men come forward with political 
panaceas, such as the Initiative and Refer- 
endum. We have seen how hollow is the 



DEMAGOGUES. 167 



promise of the loudly trumpeted "pri- 
mary," for only a small fraction of the 
voters go to the polls at all. 

Samson is blind and bound. He cannot 
effectively voice the cruelty and injustice 
which he suffers. What he needs is a man 
who will do for him what Lincoln did for 
the slave. Lincoln's name and fame are 
much spoken of but one looks in vain 
among popular leaders for a personality 
that recalls the great Emancipator and 
the mantle they try to drape about them- 
selves is much too large. 

It is said that the day of conventions 
is passing, that they will be replaced by 
some more effective manner of choosing 
candidates. Yet there is much to be said 
in favor of conventions. Convention day 
is the one day in years when Samson can 
make his pathetic appeal for justice. The 
gathering of men from all parts of the 
land does focus attention on wrongs and 
grievances as hardly anything else can. 
Doubtless there is much commercialism on 
these occasions, yet the convention of to- 
day is vastly different from the one of 
twenty years ago. It is more turbulent 



168 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 

because the people realize their disabilities 
more keenly. There is less sentimental talk 
and more plain speech about practical 
issues. 

Why should the ideal convention be as 
calm as a pink tea? Such quiet would in- 
deed be a sign of despotism. Men who 
are really in earnest are careless of par- 
liamentary law. Violence is sometimes 
disgraceful, yet it must be admitted that 
millions of our people labor under condi- 
tions that are disgraceful. These are the 
real issues of a campaign and they are 
sedulously kept out of sight by party man- 
agers and instead much eloquence is 
wasted on abstractions. 

We must have our demagogues. The 
demagogue is an imposter. This is sig- 
nificant. The multiplicity of pretenders is 
evidence that there are in the land men 
worthy of high office. We have had such 
leaders in the past and we shall have them 
again. It may not happen this time or 
four years later, but the day is surely ap- 
proaching when out of the ruck of a tur- 
bulent convention will rise one who will 
be without rhetoric or bombast a 



DEMAGOGUES. 169 



Tribune of the "plain people." With this 
conviction we can afford to bear a little 
longer with the demagogue. He is the 
impersonator of the leader who is to come. 




THE GLAD HAND. 



y*»s HE cynic ever finds in mankind ma- 
^J terial for his ungracious trade. He 
scoffs at politeness as hypocrisy 
and kindliness as a counterfeit. He 
will have it that all who are cheery are 
actuated by selfish motives. To him all 
fruit that is fair to the eye is bitter to the 
taste. He is a mental dyspeptic and nat- 
urally to his eyes mankind is a humbug 
and life a sham. 

Even men who think they eschew cyni- 
cism insensibly take an attitude of disbe- 
lief in pleasant manners. They expect too 
much from their neighbors. No matter 
how a man comports himself, he is wrong, 
according to these theories. If he be re- 
served, he acquires the reputation of 
haughtiness. If he radiates good nature, 
he is supposed to have an axe to 
grind. When we are reserved we expect 
others to recognize our position as proper ; 
if we put ourselves out to be pleasant, we 
are wroth to be told it is assumed. Why 



ON THE GLAD HAND. 171 

not give the other man the benefit of the 
same measure? 

The misapprehension all comes from 
keeping a strict code of responsibilities for 
other people and an easy one for ourselves. 
If we are looking out for our own interests, 
is it wrong for others to do the same? 
What does humanity owe us that it must 
give us something for nothing ? 

We hear of great bargains, bargains too 
good to be true. We ought to know that 
merchants seldom sell at a loss and that if 
they are so compelled, it is mean to real- 
ize on their hard necessity. But we do not 
think of that. We are perfectly willing to 
purchase goods at a price far below their 
real value. We sally forth to get some- 
thing cheap. We find that it is indeed 
cheap, that we have about what we paid 
for. Then we straightway berate the mer- 
chant as a thief. 

You are introduced to a man who seems 
the incarnation of kindness and good-fel- 
lowship. You find his society delightful 
and insensibly you begin to count on this 
as your right, and in the attempt to real- 
ize on good nature, you find that there is 



172 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

steel beneath the velvet. Ten to one, you 
denounce your quondam friend as insin- 
cere. You were looking out for your own 
interest all the time. You tried to play 
the game unfairly and half your chagrin 
comes from the realization that after all 
he is the better man. 

You meet a man of high position who is 
more democratic and good natured than 
most of his class, who puts himself out to 
talk with you, takes an interest in your 
prospects and your family. He owes you 
nothing. His kindness is a free gift. You 
begin to think you own this man. 
On occasion you encounter him in the com- 
pany of others of his set. To your suspi- 
cious eye his greeting is cold. He does not 
introduce his friends to you. You say to 
yourself, "He is a snob. I am good enough 
when he is alone, but not good enough 
when he is with rich friends !" Why should 
he introduce you to his friends? They 
have not asked it, nor have you. Perhaps 
they do not want to know you, and if he at- 
tempted to play the good fellow, both you 
and he might experience a rebuff. A man 
can be answerable for himself, but not for 



ON THE GLAD HAND. 173 

his friends or acquaintances. You were 
the snob. You wanted to be able to say, 
"I am well acquainted with such and such 
a rich man." 

Kindness is worth while for its own 
sake. It is a good in itself. Even if its 
expression were insincere beyond a doubt, 
it would be still an agency for good. It 
makes life easier. Civilization must be a bit 
insincere. Solid gold must have some alloy 
to make it practical for use. You, too, are 
committed to a host of small insincerities. 
You meet an undesirable acquaintance and 
tell him you are glad to see him. Nothing 
of the kind ! You write to Smith about a 
disputed bill and begin the letter with 
"Dear Smith." Now Smith is dear only in 
a monetary way. You finish your letter 
by "Yours sincerely." You visit a dying 
friend and hypocritically tell him he will 
soon be well again though death is written 
on his face. You congratulate another on 
his marriage though he really needs con- 
dolences and you know it. 

All dolls are stuffed with sawdust. All 
toys are make believe. Why tear the doll 
apart to view the melancholy contents or 



174 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

break the toy in sheer ill humor! They 
gave real pleasure. You can pick life 
apart, too, and find it nothing but sadness 
and disappointment with death to crown 
it all. The strongest and bravest whistle 
to keep their spirits up. Nothing 
lasts. Beauty fades, joy palls and life ever 
promises what it cannot perform. 

Shall we therefore join the cynics and 
make life worse than needs be? We are 
all aboard a sinking ship ; it is only a mat- 
ter of time. What use to whimper, or 
curse, or in other ways add to the sum of 
misery of our fellows ? It is far better to 
affect a bravery we do not feel, a cheer- 
fulness in part assumed, that others may 
not suffer unnecessary grief. 

This is taking life on an all but pagan 
basis. There is one thing that fails not, 
faith. There is one promise that will be 
redeemed in full, heaven, if we are fit for 
it. There is one Friend who will never 
fail us if we do our duty, Christ. The 
kindest man is the truly religious man, for 
his joy springs like the water that re- 
sponded to the touch of Moses' wand, from 
the rock. 



ON THE GLAD HAND. 175 

Kindliness is indestructible. No part of 
it is ever wasted and humanity bids us 
give of it the best we can, for even the 
counterfeit is better than surliness. 




CHILDHOOD. 



6 



DEN doubtless had long been a dim, 
delightful memory to our first par- 
ents before they died. After the 
loss of their original innocence 
they were changed and the world was 
changed for them. Though the children 
of Adam are born into a saddened world 
there is a paradise which they enjoy dur- 
ing the first few years of their lives, while 
still they are innocent and untroubled, and 
before they are thrust out into the wil- 
derness of toil and worry. But once the 
fairy portals have silently closed behind 
them they are changed. Something has 
been obliterated from their minds. 

Once in a while a dim picture of that 
far off time may come back to them, as 
Eve may have recalled some scene of her 
first home. Sometimes above the clang of 
the world may drift in an elusive bit of 
melody from a song that ceased years be- 
fore, but the beauty and freshness of crea- 
tion as it is mirrored in childish eyes re- 



CHILDHOOD. 177 

turns not after they are seared by expe- 
rience. The laughter that bubbles from 
young lips is a lost art in maturity. No! 
when we pass out of childhood, we are 
shut out forever, exiles. 

Children know instinctively that their 
elders are alien beings, that they 
themselves live in a world as differ- 
ent from ours as if it were in another 
planet. Children never reveal themselves 
entirely. They cannot. They have secret 
springs of joy that we never find, visions 
that to them are realities. We knew these 
things once, but that knowledge has 
passed away. 

Children are happier than grown-up 
people, but that happiness is founded on 
ignorance and illusion! Perhaps. All 
worldly happiness is similarly based. Pro- 
metheus toiled only to win agony. Worldly 
knowledge is pain. Children are spared 
it. Enter a city in the twilight. Dimness 
enshrouds all unpleasant sights, smooths 
down ugly angles, converts a scraggy 
patch of trees into a little park. It is with 
eyes reprieved from the tawdriness of 
things that the child beholds the world. 



178 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

But in another way the child sees more 
than we do. The grimy tramp slouching 
along the road is for him a hero of ad- 
venture, laborers going to work are bent 
on secret and important missions, drivers 
of wagons are voyagers who know what is 
going on in the dim beyond. He is girt 
about by delightful mysteries in the very 
presence of common things. In a very true 
sense the child is right too. The knights 
of the road do have romantic adventures, 
even as did their forerunners of the lance 
and corselet, as Jack London has explained 
to us. Laborers are bent on an important 
mission — earning their living, and so se- 
cret is it that thousands die because they 
cannot discover it. Drivers have a wide 
and valuable knowledge of the world. The 
child's instinct is wiser than our expe- 
rience. 

The secret of this lies in the fact that 
to a child no object is simply what older 
folk know it to be. Everything is pro- 
tean. He fights Indians all day in a small 
yard and sticks are the Indians. He rides 
leagues on a hobby horse without moving 
ten feet. He circumnavigates the globe by 



CHILDHOOD. 179 



means of a shingle boat in a puddle. These 
are mighty privileges. 

The supposed misery of poor children 
is doubtless exaggerated. Given food and 
air, they can be happier than their elders 
with all that wealth can buy, for the poor- 
est of them holds fairyland in fee simple 
and sprites we never see do his bidding. 

There is a freemasonry among all 
children. They tolerate grown-up people 
but never admit them to the secrets of the 
craft. Watch a man or woman talking to 
a group of children. It is like seeking in- 
formation in the enemy's country. There 
is a veiled hostility beneath their polite- 
ness, and when the interview is over, they 
run away intent on some mystic business 
which it interrupted. If you are very wise 
and patient with these small, secretive 
creatures, you may get a peep into the 
realities of their proceedings, but never a 
satisfactory view. And justly so. You 
have been expelled from that society and 
have forgotten the grip and pass word. 
Its doings are not for you to know. Chil- 
dren understand this and treat you ac- 
cordingly. 



180 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

Doubtless this is the explanation of 
much of the difficulty in taking care of 
children, a misunderstanding of the situa- 
tion. Naturally the father thinks it 
strange that his small daughter cries and 
dances when compelled to pass a large tree 
in the evening. He does not appreciate 
that the tree is a very bad giant, and she 
will never tell him. The mother who 
stumbles over a pile of bricks in the area 
way would not be so cross if she under- 
stood that she had demolished Aladdin's 
palace. It will never be told by her little 
boy. We are well meaning but blundering 
ogres of the childish fairyland. 

Contrast the helplessness of mature peo- 
ple, their inability to amuse themselves, 
their running to theatres, getting up en- 
tertainments to escape boredom, with the 
resourcefulness of a child who finds every- 
thing in the world so interesting that he is 
always, as it were, at the circus. He makes 
his enjoyment out of the most unpromis- 
ing materials. He plans and stages His 
dramas on boards that even Shakespeare 
would call bare. He really enjoys life. We 
are case-hardened. We have walked out 



CHILDHOOD. 181 



of the fairy ring and forgotten the spell 
to bring us back. The door is closed and 
we cannot recall: "Open sesame." And 
the little ragamuffin in the puddle knows 
the charm and enters as he lists. 




THE BECKONING WEST. 



XT is quite likely that Kipling's soldier 
in the dull and dreary weather of 
England heard "the East a-calling, ,, 
for the dreamy and voluptuous life 
of the Orient holds a strong appeal for 
Tommy Atkins. But for most men these 
many centuries gone, it is rather the West 
that has beckoned and called to the men 
of the East. From that cradle of the race 
in far off Asia men have now for many 
hundreds of years set their eyes and their 
feet towards the setting sun. They went 
across the wide steppes down into Europe. 
Some settled, the others went on. 

The progress continued until the pil- 
grims had reached the sea, and there for a 
time their journey was interrupted. They 
settled all over Europe, crossed even to the 
islands of the North, harrying and occupy- 
ing until the lands were filled, and new and 
old races intermingling began what we 
now call modern Europe. 

But there came a time when the beckon- 



THE BECKONING WEST. 183 

ing finger could no longer be denied. Co- 
lumbus and those who imitated him, set 
out for the West across the vast deep in 
the small ships of those days, and so at 
last this Western World of ours was dis- 
covered and occupied by those of the older 
lands. 

Here began anew the old story. At first 
the settlements were along the sea coast, 
a mere fringe on the moist hem of this 
great continent. But something in the 
blood of the men who came from over 
seas throbbed in their children, who 
pushed onward to the West. Every vari- 
ety of danger and privation faced them, 
but they would not be stayed. As we read 
the story of the first overland pilgrims, it 
is as if they were Crusaders on a new 
quest or seekers after the Holy Grail. Dec- 
ade by decade the wilderness took its 
toll of life and blood, and steadily gave be- 
fore the indomitable march of man, until 
at last the invaders crossed the Rockies 
and stood at the shores of the Pacific, 
whose far off waters wash the East 
where humanity was cradled. So there is 
nothing more to do unless men are to con- 



184 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

tinue on to the Westward until they reach 
the East again. 

All along the world-path that marks the 
successive progress of the migration of 
the nations stand great cities and rich 
fields occupied by men and women who are 
perfectly sure that the place where they 
live is the finest on the globe, and it is 
well that this is so, for contentment is the 
secret of life. But along with this satisfac- 
tion goes a certain contempt for those who 
live in newer lands, where life is raw and 
crude, where people are not polished down 
to a uniform smoothness and convention- 
ality. 

The average European today looks on us 
with a self-complacent toleration. When 
we go abroad to look at their treasures of 
art and architecture, to visit the scenes of 
the tales we have read in childhood, those 
who live in those lands think we are paying 
them a compliment, when as a matter of 
fact it is merely a pilgrimage we are mak- 
ing to the shrines of our ancestors. The 
average Englishman to this day smiles 
somewhat at the "Yankee." We make a 
good deal of after dinner talk, which is 



THE BECKONING WEST. 1S5 

accepted at its face value by the recipients ; 
at least they enjoy all the aroma there is 
in this post prandial incense. The Eng- 
lishman never realizes that the average 
American would go mad if he were con- 
demned to live the life of England. 

So, too, in our own land, the dwellers 
along the Atlantic are apt to feel quite 
complacent when they think of the West. 
They say: Our sons have made it what it 
is. That is true. But they forget that it 
was the beckoning of the West to the best 
and strongest and most adventurous 
among those nurtured in New England and 
on the Atlantic Coast that has drawn these 
mighty men who have built out there on 
the plains and across the Mississippi a 
veritable Empire. They forget that New 
England has been bled almost to the white 
that the West might grow. They forget, 
too, that these sons who have gone forth 
from them are in spirit and sympathy all 
but aliens, that they would feel as ill at 
ease and cramped by the stiffness and 
numberless conventionalities of ancestral 
neighborhoods as some lusty youngster in 
a stately parlor. 



186 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

The East woos the man who longs for 
languor, the tropic sunlight, the dreamy 
life, the aromatic winds of the lands of 
"dolce far niente." But the West woos 
men, strong, active men with red blood 
bounding in their arteries. It is like the 
rain that beats against the face of the 
sailor as his boat goes onward to sea, the 
snow blast that stings the cheek of the 
traveller who pushes forward on some er- 
rand of import. The very opposition is a 
caress, like the wild gaiety and freshness 
of a young girl. So will the West call men 
always, not to ease and luxury, but to 
work and effort. It is this attraction that 
has made this nation what it is, mighty 
and self-reliant. Many a man whom 
life condemns to remain like a peg in a 
hole, who is tied down by duty and unes- 
capable obligations, feels within him that 
tremendous rush, hears in the ears of 
fancy that cry that echoes across the cen- 
turies, the cry that men first heard in the 
far East ages ago, and following, made 
the world what it is. 



THE MORNING INTERVAL. 



w E are born again each morning. The 
vl/ night has swept away the anxieties 
of the preceding day, and we open 
our eyes to find all things new. 
Sleep gives a sort of reprieve from the 
effects of past trouble, and it is only when 
we violate the tacit compact and rush back 
into the turmoil of life, that the peace 
vouchsafed by the healing hours of uncon- 
sciousness leaves us and the excitement of 
the world resumes its sway. 

Of course there is work to be done. The 
problems of livelihood must be faced. Out- 
side our door is the burden of duties which 
we must lift again to our shoulders. But 
there is no need of hurry. It is a mis- 
take to rise as if the house were afire, 
dress in haste, snatch a morsel or two and 
run to work. It is harmful for the body 
and more so for the mind. The soul is 
never so conscious of its individuality and 
independence, so entirely master of itself 
as in the interval between waking and 
work. 



118 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

It is indeed one of the worst character- 
istics of this age of unrest that it tends 
to make people live mechanically. They 
lose that invaluable power of surveying 
themselves as distinct and accountable be- 
ings and all others as outsiders. The morn- 
ing interval is the best time of the entire 
day. The body is refreshed by sleep, the 
mind detached from the mesh of engage- 
ments and anxieties that occupy and vex 
the later waking hours. It is a time of 
normality. Once we open the door all the 
Cares troop in, even as they burst forth 
from Pandora's box, and sometimes in- 
deed Hope comes not in with them. It is 
well to put off this inevitable moment until 
we have readjusted ourselves and are able 
to receive the intruders with dignity and 
calm. 

The man who goes forth in the morning 
to his appointed duty is in a way dis- 
guised ; first in the clothes he wears, a con- 
cession to conventionality, and again in his 
manner to those whom he meets, a conces- 
sion to civility and good-fellowship. One 
must adjust himself to each friend and 
acquaintance. But the robe of sleep is the 



THE MORNING INTERVAL. 189 

badge of freedom. We can afford the lux- 
ury of being what we are, without allow- 
ances or reservations. Conventionalities 
must be. They are part of our gain from 
barbarism. But like taxes for the common 
good, they are irksome to the individual. 

But we need never worry that the world 
will not obtain its own. The Roman 
citizen who vainly sought to escape Caesar 
and the Eastern sage who tried to outrun 
death were no more certain to be captured 
than the man or woman who in our day 
strives to bid defiance to the conventions 
of modern life. 

But there is no need to wear our chains 
as ornaments. Some people appear to be 
compact of conventionality, to possess no 
"Ego," to be institutions like the news- 
paper or railroad station, and not persons ; 
doubtless for the reason that they do not 
know what self communion means. But 
the generality of folk, though close pressed 
on all sides by the world, keep certain 
chambers of the soul locked against all 
comers, reserve certain tokens that mean 
much to themselves and nothing to others. 
Hence it is always a gruesome experience 



190 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

to go over the keepsakes of a dead friend. 
We come upon many objects that spoke in 
a secret language to the one who is gone. 
We seem to be intruders in the lodgings 
of a departed soul. 

These considerations apply to normal 
men and women whose sleep is natural and 
sufficient, and who awaken to the con- 
sciousness of health. Drug-bought sleep 
presents its bill in the morning, the first 
bill of the day and the hardest to pay, the 
more so that its presentation breaks in on 
a time that should be sacred, like a bailiff 
entering a chamber with a writ. 

So for those who lie down worn with 
sickness and awaken to lift again to their 
weary shoulders the cross of pain. The 
sufferer sees himself in an unreal light, 
his musings are apt to be abnormal. But 
most pitiable of all is he to whom the 
night brings no peace, whose forehead is 
never touched by the light fingers of the 
Angel of Sleep, who stares with open eyes 
into the darkness and hears the sullen 
hours grind on until the chill morning 
breaks, welcome only because it is not 
night. Insomnia, mother of maniacs! 



THE MORNING INTERVAL. 191 

Such unfortunates feel in the early hours 
not their own but an alien consciousness; 
they are robbed of the blessed interval. 

As in all things in life except sorrow 
and death, the morning comes to no one in 
such joyful guise, with such radiant, danc- 
ing feet as to the child. He is Nature's 
darling to whom she pours out all her 
treasures with open hands. So the laugh- 
ter of children in the early day is as nat- 
ural as the sunrise song of the awakened 
birds. Both salute the morn with a hymn, 
untaught yet perfect. 

We owe it to ourselves to devote some 
time before the work of the day to self 
communion, to becoming acquainted with 
ourselves, for the day comes when we can 
no more lean upon the world, and we need 
the strength that comes of that silent soul 
talk. The hardest battles of life are soli- 
tary battles, and the last great fight, in 
which we must die to win, will be fought 
by you and by me alone. 




ACCOMPLISHMENT. 



OIGNITY is the last shred of respect- 
ability to which many who have lost 
everything else still cling. Dignity 
is a good cane, but a poor crutch. 
Like an old family name or armorial bear- 
ings, it is a fine adjunct, but a small asset. 
Centuries ago civilization was crystal- 
lized. The noble had his fixed and guar- 
anteed place in society, the commoner was 
content with a lower but still worthy con- 
dition, and the serf toiled hopelessly in 
the depths. Life and events in almost 
every land have played havoc with these 
time-honored institutions. Civilization to- 
day is in a half -molten state; it hardens 
and then liquifies. Nothing is, settled. 

Practically the only institution of the 
Western world that has preserved the re- 
spect of men for its order and orders is 
the Catholic Church, and for this reason; 
the Catholic Church uses external dignity 
merely as an adjunct. She is always ready 
to yield "storied fanes" and rich vestments 



ACCOMPLISHMENT. 193 

when principles are at stake, and go forth 
with staff and scrip like the Apostles. De- 
nuded of power, shorn of wealth, given 
over to persecution, she promptly takes 
root again and with divine vigor is soon 
as strong as before. 

Everything else has gone by the board. 
Emperors and kings stand daily at the 
bar of public opinion; they are ridiculed 
as easily as beggars and all their royal 
state goes for nothing. A sort of social 
clairvoyance has set in that rates with 
brutal frankness and a sort of rough jus- 
tice gentle and simple alike. This may be 
dangerous, a sign of decay, subversive of 
order and hostile to the best interests of 
mankind, but it is a fact. 

Yet there was never a time when a cer- 
tain segment of society, and in a way, an 
important one, ran faster and harder af- 
ter honors and titles. People are rarely 
concerned with the shadow of greatness 
until the substance has departed. Many 
names meant much in Europe three cen- 
turies ago. They mean nothing today ex- 
cept in history. This is not necessarily 
the fault of those who now bear the 



194 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

names. The conditions have changed. 
The coin is accepted no more in the marts. 

Yet American girls commit themselves 
incontinent to marriage with needy titles, 
crazed by the desire to be called by an 
old name, anxious to gain a place whose 
glory has passed these two or three hun- 
dred years, and hard-headed fathers, who 
by soul-destroying struggles have 
amassed millions bestow them upon 
strangers as if under the influence of some 
magic spell. All sorts of charlatans affect 
absurd and sounding appellations and suc- 
ceed in getting themselves accepted at 
their face value. 

Still this phenomenon is more apparent 
than real. It affects deeply an over-adver- 
tised minority, who have used up life, ex- 
hausted the gamut of the emotions and are 
spoiled by success. The magnate of the 
Cinquecento, having conquered his city or 
province, turned to collecting antiques. The 
magnate of the Twentieth Century, having 
made himself master of a Trust, the sole 
dispenser of some life-necessity, some 
trade essential, turns to collecting an- 
tiques, sons-in-law with ancient names. 



ACCOMPLISHMENT. 135 

The sane and vigorous majority is con- 
cerned with these things only as reading 
matter. When one leaves the stifling at- 
mosphere of wealth and imitation gran- 
deur for the wide plains wherein men work 
and struggle, he finds a very different code 
and rating system. First of all, men ad- 
mire effectiveness. "The man who does 
things" is the man of the millions. Next, 
effectiveness possessing also grace and 
dignity is a combination to conjure with, 
the modern "philosopher's stone/' that 
transmutes all things to gold. 

Active men resent dignity alone as a 
variety of false pretence. Success alone, 
while winning respect, still lacks the gra- 
cious something, but the two combined 
in one man take the highest place by 
unanimous vote. This is nothing new. 
The old play still keeps the boards, but 
the stage carpenter, Circumstance, has de- 
signed new scenery. Men have always 
been guided by the self -same rule in elect- 
ing their leaders and heroes. In bloodier 
days, when landmarks were unsettled and 
war the most prosperous business, amid 
the clash of shields and on gory fields, they 



196 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

lifted the soldier to their shoulders and 
shouted his name in glad acclaim. Today, 
amid the clang of manufactures, on the 
fierce battlefield of trade, they lift up the 
captain of industry, the strategist of af- 
fairs. It is always the same type of man 
who wins the plaudits and wields the 
power. Men made the kings, dukes and 
earls of dead and gone centuries for the 
same reason and by the same rule that 
today they make the rulers who sway 
commerce and politics. The type of man 
that founded European dynasties and 
made the names "that ring down the cor- 
ridors of time," if translated to our day, 
would command men just the same. Our 
modern magnates thrust back a few cen- 
turies would establish kingdoms by the 
same inevitable law. 

Why then should we bother about hon- 
ors and name-handles ? The public has its 
own code of nobility and enforces it with 
an iron hand. It is not concerned with 
virtue as such, or uprightness as such, 
but with effectiveness. Every man has 
his rating in that list, a rating irrespective 
of genealogy, strictly according to the 



ACCOMPLISHMENT. 197 

measure of his proven ability, but in the 
highest place of that "fierce democracies 
always sits the man of effectiveness and 
dignity. 




TODAY. 



XT IS quite the fashion to extol the 
past and malign the present. There 

is nothing new about this attitude. 

A certain number of people are al- 
ways out of joint with the age in which 
they live. There are many factors in mod- 
ern life that tend to accentuate and exag- 
gerate this attitude, though this too may 
be alleged in defence of any period. There 
are many advocates abroad preaching the 
gospel of discontent and emphasizing ev- 
erything that can make people fancy them- 
selves ill used. One of these factors is the 
daily newspaper focusing the concentrated 
woes and horrors of the world on the in- 
dividual. Another is the scolding maga- 
zine that exists only to find fault with the 
universe as it is constituted. Now the 
average reader is an idolater ; he worships 
the daily printed word ; to him it is infalli- 
ble. He may doubt many things : the exis- 
tence of God, the inspiration of the Bible, 
the immortality of the soul, but he never 



TODAY. 199 

thinks of doubting what is served up to 
him morning and evening on a wood-pulp 
flimsy. 

One point on which the evangelists of 
trouble are insistent is that the world is 
going to the dickens; that the poor were 
never so ill treated, the rich so heartless 
and the whole social economy so hopelessly 
wrong. It is possible to illustrate this un- 
healthy state of mind by the example of 
a wife who has not enough to do. She 
compares her lot with what she sees of 
other women. She compares her husband 
with what she hears and sees of other 
men. She discounts every blessing that 
is hers and magnifies every comfort that 
surrounds others. There is only one seem- 
ing hope on her horizon, divorce ! In a way, 
it may be said of modern society that it 
dreams of divorce from facts, from certain 
evils that must be, from certain pains that 
must be borne, and hugs the delusion that 
another alliance will bring all it sighs for. 

If one has a bit of the judicial tempera- 
ment, he will grow weary of this constant 
plaint of discontented folk who abuse the 
age in which they live as if it were the 



200 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

abomination of desolation. The fact is, 
this generation is spoiled. It has so many 
things that it cries for the impossible like 
an ill-tempered child. A little reading 
of history would do much to change the 
view of our chronic complainers. If they 
were to go back in spirit a few years or 
decades and sense what men and women 
had to bear, it might open their eyes. 

Without dwelling on the present state 
of things across the Atlantic, it is many 
a year since we felt the horror of war and 
many more since our people saw an enemy 
in their streets. Long ago the great pesti- 
lences have been conquered by the sleep- 
less brain of science. Long ago the in- 
tolerable discomforts of travel and com- 
munication have been eliminated by the 
capitalists we are so fond of abusing. In 
fact, the world has been made what it is 
for our benefit. The very poor, the pa- 
riahs, are the same in every century, but 
the average man and woman of today 
have such comforts as would amaze the 
rich of fifty years ago. 

Recently I visited several handsome 
mansions of the ante-bellum type, ad- 



TODAY. 201 

mired their graceful lines, stately furni- 
ture and indescribable dignity. Then there 
came to me the comparison. The people 
who lived in these beautiful houses had 
not a tithe of the conveniences that the 
day laborer has at present. A bath room 
was undreamed of, steam heat or hot 
water systems unthought of, the telephone 
would have started a witchcraft craze. A 
train that would bear the traveler one hun- 
dred miles comfortably in three hours 
would have been laughed to scorn by the 
stalwart folk who occupied these solid 
dwellings. Then consider illumination, even 
that provided through the medium of the 
execrated Rockefeller, not to mention 
acetylene and the radiance that Edison has 
given us. Finally, think of the great mat- 
ter of food. The Roman exquisite revelled 
in his banquet of assembled foods from 
distant parts of the empire. The modern 
clerk or mechanic sits down to a meal that 
assembles the products of a continent and 
thinks himself badly served. 

Some student would render a service to 
us by investigating the meaning of the 
word, "comfort/' in different epochs of his- 



202 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

tory. Not but what misery exists, and ex- 
tortion and cruelty! Man never yet has 
evolved a scheme of life that eliminated 
these things. The fact is, the standard 
of living has shifted. People demand as 
necessities what the fortunate of earlier 
days regarded as luxuries. How the work- 
man of a century ago would have rejoiced 
in the eight-hour working day, in the com- 
forts that warm the modest home, in the 
clothing that covers people of small in- 
comes ! What amusement had the people 
of New England seventy-five years ago? 
None but what they devised themselves. 
Now you can stand in a village street and 
watch the wives and children of poor 
families stream into the moving-picture 
theatre. The dwellers in the small cities 
can have the best that the drama affords 
for a small sum. The laborer is conveyed 
for miles to his work for a nickel. The 
modern school is equipped as no king could 
fit up quarters for his children two hun- 
dred years ago. 

The men and women of the present day 
are spoiled. They have so much that they 
cry for the moon. Because, for a cent they 



TODAY. 203 

have the news of the world to read; be- 
cause, for five cents they are whirled from 
one town to another; because they are 
warm and well-fed they grow peevish and 
demand the unattainable. Yes, we have 
sickness, poverty, discomfort, but not even 
one per cent of what the children of men 
bore in past centuries. Thank God you 
are living today. 




THE BLACK MAN. 



© 



HE Governor of South Carolina has 
been indulging in violent vaporings 
on the race question and various 
editors have criticized his utter- 
ances in terms scarcely less vitriolic. It 
is strange that these grizzled veterans of 
the press, who have been dealing with 
"roorbacks" and other political dodges 
time out of mind, failed to discern the 
Ethiopian in that particular wood-pile. Ap- 
pealing to race prejudice for votes is sure- 
ly nothing new in our "fierce democracie." 
This brand of it, however, is dangerous; 
it is liable to enlarge that foul blot on our 
civilization — burning negroes alive. 

The North was wrought up over slav- 
ery as never before or since. No other 
issue produced so much enthusiasm, elo- 
quence and poetry — real and alleged. It 
was the berseker madness of a self- 
contained people, for what men and 
women in their sober senses would take 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" for realism or that 



THE BLACK MAN. 205 

masterpiece of fustian : "The Battle Hymn 
of the Republic/' for poetry! Righteous 
indignation was all the easier, because few 
Northern communities knew anything 
about the discomforts of a negro majority. 
Beneath all the high sentiment of that 
time one feels the presence of the smug 
satisfaction: "Let the galled jade wince, 
our withers are unwrung." It was worthy 
of note then and is now, that those to 
whom detestation of negro slavery was a 
religion never blinked at white industrial 
slavery. Dividends? Of course not! 

The North was fired with the mighty 
principle that no man should own another 
man — if that other happened to be black — 
but it seemed to forget that it was a con- 
dition, not a theory, that confronted the 
South ; it displayed a marked lack of under- 
standing of, and sympathy with practical 
Southern problems. The fact was that 
slavery was a minor issue converted into 
a shibboleth by animosity. Anyone who 
reads American history from the Revolu- 
tion to the Civil War can not fail to see 
that Mason and Dixon's line separated two 
hostile policies, that the differences be- 



206 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

tween the two were not debatable and were 
bound to come at last to the arbitriment of 
the sword. Once the fight was on, one 
side wished to cripple the other and the 
North made a sort of idol of the negro. As 
a result of the war, the black man had a 
vote for which he was not fitted and which 
he knew not how to use. All the military 
force of reconstruction and the "carpet- 
bagger" was powerless to make this any- 
thing but a dead-letter law. In many 
States it is so today and will remain for 
many a long year. 

It was unfortunate that the negroes 
were not distributed more evenly through 
the country, for it was precisely because 
of sectionalism that the North idealized 
and spoiled the colored man, although in 
practice and as a class the people of the 
Northern States are not willing to admit 
the negro to real equality and hurt his 
feelings far more than the people of the 
South. It may be that this problem is 
incapable of solution, that it is the penalty 
for a crime against the law of nations, for 
the slave traffic that placed the black man 
in an environment where he will always be 



THE BLACK MAN. 207 

an inferior. The pity of it is that he, who 
was the original victim, is the scapegoat 
for most of the odium and pain. 

One thing is certain, and it should make 
us less intolerant towards the people of 
the South — though it can never palliate 
the horrible barbarities committed against 
the negro when the white man takes the 
law into his own hands — if this race ques- 
tion is ever solved, it will be by the South- 
ern people. They know the negro at his 
best and at his worst. Whoever reads 
Grady's great speech on "The New South" 
will be convinced of this, of the deep un- 
derstanding, a real liking for the son of 
Ham on the part of the white people of 
the South. Perhaps the fairest estimate 
of him recently from Northern lips came 
from Hon. Morgan J. O'Brien in a speech 
delivered in New York in 1899 and quoted 
recently in the Boston Herald: 

"No more striking proof is needed of 
the truth that right principle, more than 
racial blood, is necessary to the growth of 
heroes, than we have had exhibited by a 
race which, though separated from us, yet 
stands side by side with us in forming our 



208 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

citizenship. A generation ago it was a race 
of slaves. Today, it has its representa- 
tives among our heroes. Not all the 
waters of the ocean can make it white, 
for it wears the burnished livery of the 
sun. But it earned its place in history by 
the side of the Irish at Fontenoy and the 
Old Guard at Waterloo, when the colored 
regular regiments went up to death on 
San Juan hill, with their merry eyes 
twinkling and their white teeth gleaming, 
singing as they went, 'Climbing up de 
Golden Stairs/ " 

But wipe out the color line! As the 
speaker says, not all the waters of the 
ocean can do that. But what we can do is, 
be honest with the black man, and not 
take back from him with one hand what 
we give with the other. To use one code 
of action when wrought up in enthusiasm 
or in theoretical discussion and another for 
everyday life is fatal and unjust to him 
and to ourselves. This has done more 
harm than all the intemperate utterances 
of Southern demagogues. 

As a matter of fact, the black man in 
the Northern States needs no bogus phil- 



THE BLACK MAN. 209 

anthropy. We can well afford to let the 
South settle the race problem in its own 
way — providing it is a law-abiding way 
and not the fashion of the savage. The 
Governor of South Carolina does not rep- 
resent Southern sentiment. It is time 
that the racial hypocrisy of the Sixties 
were relegated to "innocuous deseu- 
tude" together with the waving of "the 
bloody shirt." 




FRIENDSHIP. 



fi 



HILOSOPHERS have told us that he 
who has one or two friends is a 
fortunate man. They might have 
said with equal truth that he who 
possesses one or two perfect diamonds is 
fortunate. It is indeed a part of the value 
of all things precious that they are rare. 
Again it may be seriously doubted 
whether one can rightly fulfil the offices 
of friendship for more than one or two. 
They who are said to "have many friends" 
often find in times of stress that they have 
not even one. Life itself, even the ordinary 
and uneventful life, is a severe test of the 
quality of friendship. Think of the gaunt- 
let that an old and tried friend must have 
run : absence, grief, change of worldly po- 
sition, misunderstanding, evil minded ac- 
quaintances. It is a very labyrinth, a 
slough of despond, and sometimes the 
outer rim of an inferno that a man must 
pass through before he can qualify as the 
true friend of another. 



FRIENDSHIP. 211 

It may seem strange to dignify ordinary 
lives as if they were of the fabric of which 
mankind's deathless stories have been 
woven. They are. The most moving 
tragedies, the grandest dramas were orig- 
inally the simple yet pathetic happenings 
in the lives of ordinary people, but the 
world has placed a halo about these sto- 
ries because they epitomized the human 
heart and its workings in grief or joy. So 
the tiny dramas played silently in the 
hearts of simple folk contain all the ele- 
ments of true power. They are miniature 
masterpieces. Each one is a microcosm. 
Love itself is only a dearer name for the 
attar of roses of true friendship. It comes 
to the peasant as it does to the king and it 
comes not often. Many pretenders and 
masqueraders may come to one or the 
other, but when the jollity is over and the 
rout ended, they all unmask and we know 
them for what they are. 

Some complain that they have no 
friends. They do not need friends. They 
really sigh for human props, trouble-car- 
riers, skilled heart-nurses serving without 
pay. When they speak of friends they 



THE USES OF ADVERSIT I 

mean traffic-policemen, people who will 
help them out in difficult situations. With 
them friendship is a one-sided affair. 

Instead of being despondent that we 
have so few friends, it would be much more 
pertinent, seeing what unsatisfactory crea- 
tures we are, how compacted of selfishness, 
weakness and meanness, if we were to ask 
ourselves in all honesty, by what freak of 
good fortune we ever happened to seem 
worthy of having even one true friend. 

Yet like the prospector in a new mining 
country, we ought constantly to be on the 
lookout for friends. No sage can lay down 
rules for the finding of friends. You may 
in your pilgrin\age through life encounter 
in early years one who seems to have been 
designed from the constitution of things 
to be your friend. The experience has all 
the charm of fairy-land, the unreality of a 
dream, the suddenness of a lightning flash, 
yet the passing years but witness to its 
truth, that the electric spark flashing be- 
tween kindred souls made no mistake. 

It may be that chance throws you for a 
time into the company of one of whom 
you would never think in the guise of a 



FRIENDSHIP. 



friend. In exterior he does not measure 
up to the ideal standard you have set. Yet 
the unfolding of circumstance, the stress 
of life, crucial crises reveal to your as- 
tonished eyes depths of generosity, riches 
of unfailing trust of which no living man 
can ever be really worthy. It was a wise 
man who said : "Be careful how you treat 
your enemy, for one day he may be your 
friend." 

Life can never be monotonous or weari- 
some to the man who hopes to find in a 
newcomer a friend who will be as true as 
steel. It is perhaps one of the best of the 
purely natural joys of living. Yet like the 
pursuit of the Holy Grail, it must be car- 
ried on with purity of intention. If we 
look for those who will help us on in the 
world, if we have ulterior motives, it is 
certain we shall never discover true 
friends, for our eyes are blinded by our 
own unworthiness. 

Friendship is not demonstrative. It 
needs not to hang out bulletins that it is 
unchanged. The world has no business in 
such matters. These outward advertise- 
ments serve very well as the stage settings 



214 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

of a fiction, like the "amity of nations" or 
the carefully phrased notes that pass be- 
tween the rulers of States. It is of the es- 
sence of friendship that it should be a calm 
reality, shunning show yet possessing "the 
strength of the hills." The time when it 
has the right to proclaim itself before the 
world is the time of crisis when others fall 
away. Then out of the ranks of the time- 
servers and pretenders stands forth the 
true friend and proves the quality of his 
regard. A man is always ennobled by such 
a proof. It helps him to recognize reali- 
ties, to appreciate true loyalty. He sees 
then that if he were to go into the market- 
place with the wealth of the world at his 
disposal, he might offer it all and be unable 
to buy one friend. 

Friendship is a grace, a free gift, of 
which the recipient is never - worthy. 
Therein consists its unique preciousness. 
Blessed is that day in the life of a man 
when he can lie down in the evening in 
the untroubled certainty that he has found 
a friend. He may well mark that day with 
a white stone and celebrate its anniver- 
saries. He may live to great age or come 



FRIENDSHIP. 215 

to high position, but he will never receive 
a higher compliment or a greater gift. God 
bless our friends ! 




ENCOURAGEMENT. 



H 



A 



UMAN nature wants so many things 
that it is useless to make a 
list of them all, but one thing it 
needs badly and all the time — en- 
couragement. Not many souls are self- 
sufficient, do not have their hours of deep 
depression, and these hours are often cru- 
cial ones. Often the failure to make a 
step forward is a step backward. 

I am not speaking of weaklings, but of 
men and women who know what life is — 
know it too well. The mask of illusion has 
been torn off as far as they are concerned 
and they can see failure grinning before 
them. They come to that stage where 
facts defeat them. You can regard facts 
as the dumb beasts of creation as some 
writer has it, or you can look on them as 
arch-charlatans. They are a little of both. 
But in either case persistent purpose will 
tame the beasts or expose the charlatans, 

There were facts to spare in the house- 
hold of the man who invented the 



ENCOURAGEMENT. 217 

vulcanizing of rubber. One of the worst of 
them was lack of food and money. But he 
kept on doggedly and at last by accident 
hit upon the secret he had striven for 
years to discover. Harriman had his fight 
with facts years ago and conquered them 
by his power of imagination. He found 
out that there are millions to be obtained 
by the man who can borrow money and 
make it work hard. Perhaps nothing has 
been more ridiculed than the foolishness 
of a man trying to fly. We all re- 
member "Darius Green and His Fly- 
ing Machine." Newspaper men had great 
sport some time ago telling about the 
Wright brothers out in Ohio hopping over 
the hills on contrivances they called "glid- 
ers." The facts were all against the 
Wright brothers, yet not so long ago one 
of the Wrights circled over New York and 
around the Statue of Liberty. These are 
merely a few instances of the idiocy of 
being discouraged by facts. 

To get back among the common people, 
the men on your own street, those whom 
you meet every day ; the tyranny of facts 
is the great evil. Talk seriously to the 



218 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

first half dozen men you happen to know 
and you will find they are more or less dis- 
couraged. Facts are getting too strong 
for them. Sickness, loss of work, family 
troubles are getting on their nerves and 
spoiling their waking hours. They are 
really capable of getting the best of these 
troubles with a little encouragement. 
There ought to be shops where this admir- 
able quality could be dispensed and ex- 
perts be ready to give optimistic advice. 

If a man once gains a reputation for 
being able to cheer people up he will be 
besieged morning, noon and night. People 
resort to him from all sides. This is one 
of the secrets of that latest phase of quack- 
ery — "Christian Science" — it cheers peo- 
ple up, convinces them that nothing mat- 
ters and that everything is all right. It is 
a great idea and capable of much good for 
most of our troubles are imaginative. The 
harm came of labelling the thing as a reli- 
gion and financing it like a patent medi- 
cine. 

The doctor who cheers his patients 
never lacks them and they generally re- 
cover, for belief in recovery is a great fac- 



ENCOURAGEMENT. 219 

tor in convalescence. The lawyer who con- 
vinces his clients they will win succeeds if 
he has ordinary ability because he con- 
vinces the jury also. The merchant who 
is an optimist builds up a large business 
for he infuses his spirit into his assistants 
and buyers flock to his shop. Now this 
may all be called moonshine and nonsense, 
but it is very true nevertheless that the 
ability to convince people who see failure 
looming before them that they will suc- 
ceed does result in success in nine times 
out of ten. 

The capacity of doing things success- 
fully in this world consists largely in beat- 
ing down facts. Now a man may be born 
with this capacity or it may be infused 
into him. This country is an example of 
the truth. It was not merely the oppor- 
tunities that it opened to incomers, it was 
a something they seemed to draw out of 
American air, a sublime conviction that it 
was going to be a great country and that 
they themselves were to have a part in its 
greatness. Take any one of the thousands 
of men born to poverty and no pros- 
pects who have achieved success in 



220 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

any line of endeavor. Experience would 
have spoiled them, but they had no expe- 
rience and so achieved the impossible. 
Many of them could never have done this, 
without encouragement at the right time. 
The young man or woman who hopes to 
win fame by writing is considered a joke. 
If they listen to experience they will re- 
main a joke. It is encouragement that en- 
ables them to convert the dream into a 
reality. Of course ability must be postu- 
lated. The sad thing is that much ability 
comes to naught because it lacks encour- 
agement, Once let a man become pene- 
trated with the idea that he cannot win 
and he is sure to lose. Now we cannot all 
be winners. Every battle means so many 
corpses in the field when all is over. For 
the majority mediocrity is the portion, but 
there is no need of putting ourselves in 
that class while there is an ounce of energy 
left. Then there is always the chance of 
helping others more gifted than we, hut 
who are losing courage. If we cannot win 
ourselves, let us do it by proxy, by en- 
abling someone else to win. Great vic- 
tories of war and peace, poems that are 



ENCOURAGEMENT. 221 

immortal, careers that are an inspiration 
to mankind have come about through 
encouragement. What boots it that the 
collaborators fail to get credit? They 
have fulfilled their destiny in helping 
some great work to be done. 




THE LAND OF JOY. 



>^]OU will not find it on the map, nor 

^gr will any many-cylindered motor 

H car or bi-plane be of any assistance 

in the attempt to reach it. Yet the 

denizens of that land are all around us. 

They are a sort of secret society, the 

great company whose pass-word is "joy," 

but if you are not a member the pass-word 

will do you no good. The society is so 

secret that the members do not realize it 

themselves. 

The grimy urchin wandering happily 
along the noisesome street singing at the 
top of his voice belongs to the company; 
you have only to look at him to see it. 
He will not give the secret away because 
he knows nothing about it ; he has merely 
the use and enjoyment of it. The gang of 
brawny laborers on their way to work, 
chaffing each other and filling the air with 
rough laughter, give the looker-on no hint 
of their high standing in that exclusive 
society. Next is a bevy of schoolgirls 



THE LAND OF JOY. 223 

munching candy, giggling and clutching 
one another after the manner of half- 
grown women whose lives have not yet 
been shadowed by sorrow. What dissim- 
ilar types! Yet all three live, move and 
have their being in the Land of Joy. 

Some writer, rightly or wrongly, has 
proposed the theory that the angels do not 
necessarily live beyond the stars, that the 
dwellers in the Celestial City may be near- 
er us than we imagine. We never hear 
their voices lifted in hymns to the Most 
High, for our ears are dull. We never 
catch the smallest glimpse of their flash- 
ing beauty, for human eyes behold only 
gross, material things. 

It is not exactly so with the dwellers 
in the Land of Joy. We can see the glee 
dancing in the care-free eyes of the boy; 
we can hear the jovial talk of workers 
who are healthy and contented, we can 
even detect happiness beneath the giggle 
of the schoolgirl, but unless you belong 
to the mystic company, that is as near as 
you will get to the secret. 

Except for these random occasions, it 
is rare indeed that one has the chance to 



224 THE USES OF ADVERSIT \ 

study this phenomenon. Hence, I esteem 
myself most fortunate that I was privi- 
leged to spend an evening with a group 
made up of charter members. Had you 
happened in, you might have gone away 
without suspecting the truth. They were 
gathered in a tiny restaurant high above 
the crowded street, a crowd of men at sup- 
per. I know little about them except that 
they fairly radiated good cheer. Across 
the board flashed an endless succession 
of jests, interspersed with flurries of song, 
and deep, honest laughter as some point 
was well scored. They ate and drank and 
talked like a crowd of boys out for a frolic. 
Soon one took up a guitar and began to 
sing folk-songs filled with blue skies and 
sunshine. He was a rare comedian, that 
fellow with the guitar. He could interpret 
the tarantella with an art and finish that 
would shame the sinuous ladies who dance 
Spring songs. He could imitate the lover 
carolling beneath the balcony of his 
inamorata until you would think she lived 
in one of the tall houses across the street. 
i the others supported him well, all 
could sing the songs of the South in that 



THE LAND OF JOY. 225 

language whose spoken words are as mol- 
ten music. 

Here was the wonder of it. The en- 
vironment was plain, the men, not of 
wealth or special cultivation, yet gathered 
about that table by some subtle gift they 
radiated gladness. I thought what a price- 
less boon to thousands in the great city 
the knowledge of that secret would be, not 
merely to the homeless wanderers or dis- 
contented workmen, but even to the bored 
audiences in the theatres, the listless din- 
ers in exclusive hotels, the dissipated folk 
who nightly run crazily after enjoyment 
and paying high, never get it. Here it 
was after all, in a small dining-room, hid- 
den away on a side street, and these light- 
hearted singers and jesters, for all their 
disguise, were of rare fellowship. 

Of course it is not a place ; it is a state 
of mind. Some people there are who have 
not the faculty of it, as certain folk cannot 
understand or relish music, but there are 
lands more favored than others in this 
matter of joy. It is difficult for one to 
live in Italy and not be influenced by the 
good-nature and natural gaiety of all 



226 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

about him. And in Ireland, too, in spite 
of all the trouble that has come to its 
people, there is deep in their natures a 
bubbling spring of joy that overcomes 
hunger, sadness and an alien rule. 

The inventors are racking their brains 
contriving new mechanical marvels, the 
financiers are shortening their lives plan- 
ning new and larger companies, energy is 
poured out like water that money may be 
produced in larger quantities. I have 
no sympathy with all this useless effort. 
What humanity really needs is geniuses 
who will devote their gifts to the produc- 
tion and diffusion of joy. 




THE AGELESS HEART. 




OMETIME ago I read a story about 
an old woman who had just lost 
her husband and whose children 
were doing their best to comfort 
her. They hid every reminder of the dead 
man, never left her alone, tried to cheer 
her up, hoping in this way to give her 
consolation. 

At last, the old lady, desperate at their 
well-intended attempts at comforting, con- 
trived a subterfuge to get them all out of 
the house. When she was alone, her bit- 
ter grief came forth in the cry: "Willy, 
Willy !" He whom she had lost was not 
the aged man the children had seen borne 
to the grave, but the handsome, winning 
young fellow of other years. She was not 
the old woman they thought her, but the 
little lass who had linked her life with his. 
They were all mistaken. 

How hard it was to part with him no 
one but herself could know, and there was 
but one way to meet her grief, alone. She 



228 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

ransacked every closet where they had 
hidden the clothes and well-remembered 
trinkets of her husband, brought them to 
their accustomed places and indulged her- 
self in a good cry. After that she felt 
better. 

What fools we are when dealinj with 
old folks! We adopt a policy divided be- 
tween the comforting of a child and the 
soothing of a demented person. It is 
futile, for we mistake the entire condition. 
The whitening hair, the lagging step, the 
wrinkled brow delude us and we conjure 
up an unreal personality and do our best 
to make that unreality happy. 

Grandpa and Grandma sit by the fire 
outwardly placid and unnoticing. He is 
bent and feeble, his eye is dim, his speech 
halting. She, too, is worn with years 
and peers at us through her thick 
spectacles. The dear old couple, what a 
picture they make and how mcn.y senti- 
mental remarks they occasion! We feel 
moved to give them encouragement and 
use that tenderly patronizing tone re- 
served for the very young. We soften 
things down for them, offer platitudes 



THE AGELESS HEART. 229 

which we fondly think are appreciated and 
then go back to our families with feelings 
of conscious rectitude. 

What a deplorable lack of insight ! Why 
that old man sees what is utterly beyond 
our ken. Before him is a wisp of a girl 
with hair that will not be confined and eyes 
that are dancing. She enacts every mood 
of an April day, flouts and jeers him ten- 
derly just for the fun of consoling him in 
a way she alone knows. Her quiet words 
that are so familiar to the younger mem- 
bers of the family are transfigured for him. 
The reason his eyes look dim is that he 
is always looking backward. 

Grandma knits quietly. You would nev- 
er suspect her thoughts. Women are de- 
ceivers ever and the best of them deceive 
the most. They make us think they are 
well when they are racked with pain, they 
smile when their hearts are breaking, 
they console when the whole world is a 
wilderness of bitterness to them. So 
Grandma fools us all. She understands 
completely the wiles of the young people 
and smiles internally. Teach Grandma! 



230 THE USES OP ADVERSITY 



She will never give herself away, but in 
her heart this is what she sees: 

Across the chimney-corner is a well- 
knit, ruddy boy, half -confident and half- 
afraid. His eyes are bright and teeth 
shining in a familiar smile. She keeps 
him in a condition of delightful impatience. 
A handsome youth, so kind, so weak, so 
strong, so hot-tempered and yet humble! 
How many tasks he has done, how many 
presents he has given just to behold that 
look in her eyes ! Yes, Grandma sees many 
things that escape us, through those thick 
spectacles. 

The human heart never grows old ; it is 
as tender and delicate at seventy as at sev- 
enteen. The frame grows old, the senses 
are dulled, a gentle patience diffuses itself 
through the body, but the affections are 
unchanged. You have often , heard old 
people say that fifty years seemed but a 
short time ; the reason is that in a certain 
sense, they are still in the living present 
of long ago. 

Aged folk understand each other, for 
they know they are really not old at all, 
only seemingly so. But they are wary and 



THE AGELESS HEART. 231 

keep this to themselves. This phenomenon 
recalls many of the familiar tales of en- 
chantment, of men and women changed 
in outward form by the power of some 
magic; but you will remark that in all 
such stories, it is only the body that is 
changed in some grotesque manner; the 
mind, the soul remain the same. Time, 
the magician touches the boys and girls of 
yesterday with his wand and, as it seems, 
all the outward characteristics of youth 
disappear; the quick energy, the alert 
senses, the attractiveness of feature and 
form. But the spell of the magician stops 
there. 

The sons want Grandma to move out 
of the little house in the country and take 
an apartment where she will have comfort 
and care. It will be so convenient for her, 
so nice to have young people about. But 
Grandma will have nothing to do with the 
plan. Here is the home to which her hus- 
band brought her years ago. Every board 
in the floor is dear to her, every tree and 
shrub have a message and delightful mem- 
ory. Here she can sit and wait for him 
to come home, though he comes no more. 



232 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

The familiar surroundings help her to keep 
on living. Where on earth can she find the 
comfort, the peace and joy that center in 
this little house ? In the tales of enchant- 
ment the spell is always lifted finally, 
and the hero and heroine after their vicis- 
situdes return to their original guise. The 
aged wait for that return. 

While we are young it is useless to try 
and enter the world of the old. We shall 
enter in time. But let us not make the 
mistake of thinking the dim eyes and 
wrinkled cheeks tell the whole story. They 
are only folds of the veil that time has 
gradually draped over the foreheads and 
shoulders and down to the feet of those 
who in reality are ever young. 




IN MEMORIAM. 



X STOOD this week by the open grave 
of one of the sweetest and bravest 
Christian women I have ever 
known. A few days ago she was 
with us, full of life and anticipation, dif- 
fusing the warmth of her lovable person- 
ality, and now we were gathered in the 
cemetery to pay her the last sorrowful 
tribute. 

As the earth sifted down upon the 
coffin, I looked back through the mist of 
unbidden tears on the radiant years of our 
flawless friendship. The thronging memo- 
ries flashed by, each touched anew with 
sad beauty by the pathos of the scene and 
the realization that the word, finis, had 
been written in the record of a singularly 
unselfish and noble life. 

I saw her again as the care-free girl in 
the garden spot by the sea she loved so 
well, her eyes twinkling with merriment, 
her laugh like the tinkle of tiny bells, her 
mind busy on whatever would bring joy to 



234 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 

those about her ; as the happy bride kneel- 
ing before the good old Bishop beside the 
man of her choice; as the young mother 
glad in the baptism of her first born; as 
the gracious hostess whose smile was a 
sunbeam and whose welcome held an in- 
communicable charm. 

In the old streets of European cities 
there are little shrines set up in the walls 
of houses, recalling to the wayfarer the 
Friends of God. So, in a city where one 
has lived a long time certain houses are 
shrines of friendship. Time may change 
or destroy, Death may work his will, but 
whenever one passes the familiar portals, 
he beholds the vivid picture of hospitality 
and goodly converse, of geniality and 
heart-felt fellowship. When the heedless 
car sweeps me past the house which was 
so long to me the house of my friends, 
friends among a thousand, I see her in 
fancy standing at the door and feel that 
hand-clasp whose reality I shall never 
know again. The old house we laughingly 
abused and wanted to turn around to face 
the sunlight, means nothing to the hurry- 



IN MEMORIAM. 235 



ing throngs or to those who live there 
now, but to me it is a shrine. 

As the earth sifted down upon the coffin 
I thought of many in the graves near her's 
who in life had loved her, warmed to the 
touch of her hand, felt the consolation of 
her voice, the inspiration of her generous 
activity. As I looked about on the men 
and women who sould not bear to leave her 
until the inevitable moment, I saw on every 
side those who were better that she had 
lived, who had received of her kind offices 
and smiling encouragement. As I looked 
back at the city from which we had come, 
I thought of the many households sad- 
dened by her loss, of the poor who would 
miss her. Then came the crashing vision 
of the stricken home from which she had 
been borne, the husband left to fight the 
battle alone, the little ones who must grow 
up without the kisses that only a mother 
can give, the tender touches that to all 
others are a Lost Art. There are many 
sad sounds in this weary world and one 
of the saddest of all is the fall of the clods 
on the coffin of a beloved friend. 

All her life pain had walked beside her, 



236 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 

but she always smiled. She could bear her 
own troubles unfalteringly; it was only 
the pain of others that saddened her. The 
ideal happiness of her own life opened her 
heart to those who were in misery. She 
was never too tired to respond to the call 
of duty or charity. The thought of little 
children in winter without shoes oppressed 
her, until the want was supplied. The poor 
must have their Christmas dinner even if 
she had to go without her own. Wherever 
there was death or sorrow among her ac- 
quaintances you would be sure to see her. 
As a wife and mother she was a gift of 
God to her husband. In truth it could be 
carved on her tomb-stone that she lived 
for others. 

In every large duty large or small she 
showed that fine conscientiousness that 
does all things well. I shall always think 
of her as bearing gifts, not merely the 
material ones whose great value consists 
in the good heart that prompts the giving, 
but the better gifts of kindness, sympathy 
and encouragement. She never failed to 
find an excuse for those who offended, a 
charitable explanation for the words that 



IN MEMORIAM. 237 



hurt her. She would go all the way on the 
road of forgiveness and was grieved only 
when forgiveness failed. 

In all the years I counted her my friend, 
from the first day we met until she died, 
there was never a time of joy or sorrow in 
my life that she did not give unstintingly 
of her congratulation, her consolation, and 
all the time, in full measure and overflow- 
ing, of her abiding friendship. She was to 
all who knew her a constant inspiration to 
long-suffering, self-sacrifice and charity. 
God be blessed for such friends and vouch- 
safe resignation when the parting comes! 

They laid her out in the sunny south 
parlor beneath the picture of the Lord 
whose uplifted fingers seemed to bless her 
in death. The flowers sent by her friends 
carpeted the floor, but there was one rose 
blossom on her quiet breast. They told me 
it bloomed in her garden the day she died. 
I would put nothing beside that rose, but 
in remembrance of a thousand deeds of 
kindness, in recognition of the best that 
life can give and death take away, pure, 
noble Catholic womanhood, I lay this sprig 
of rosemary in snirit on her grave and 



238 



THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 



pray that God may grant unto her eternal 
rest and that the light of His love may 
shine upon her forever. 




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